


Born Asleep

by eso (cazzy), soottea



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Angst, Bottom Lance, Humor, M/M, Modern Magic, Piercings, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements, altering POVs, always bottom lance, cambion!keith, it's sex magic i don't gotta explain shit, poor decision-making, soul reaper!lance, touch-starved lance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-03 00:21:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8689369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cazzy/pseuds/eso, https://archiveofourown.org/users/soottea/pseuds/soottea
Summary: He's not fond of his career, but there isn't much to do about that when his entire existence is based around reaping the souls of the recently deceased. When he gets entangled with a pair of sibling mages, a fallen angel, and a half-demon, though, Lance's life as a reaper of death certainly gets a lot more interesting.Or, Lance never expected a fifteen-year-old human girl to shake the very foundations of his being, but he's never been more thankful for it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, and welcome to this wild ride! Bron and I are _super_ excited to get this thing rolling. What started out as a shitty joke about a demon working at an underworldly variant of a quick cash loan shop has transformed into this monster of a fic. It got way out of hand (not that either of us are complaining) and we love it to bits and would die for reaper Lance and cambion Keith.
> 
> Bron also has some incredible art skills and has done some insane concept art for the characters, so I will definitely post those as she draws them! Click [here,](https://twitter.com/sootttea/status/790844889885921280) [here,](https://twitter.com/sootttea/status/780573268365365248) [here,](https://twitter.com/sootttea/status/781032883448377344) and [here](https://twitter.com/sootttea/status/780935785616781312) if you like having eye orgasms.

The sensation isn't the easiest to explain — he lacks a corporeal body, rendering him incapable of comprehending fully the feeling of pain that wracks the forms of the humans whose souls he reaps. He’s familiar enough with the concept: mortals instinctively shy away from dangers that bring them harm, and the unwanted ache that speaks of peril and destruction is something they typically avoid.

He’s incapable of avoiding  _this_ feeling, though. It radiates throughout his being, a tingling that’s coupled with an intense pressure building just behind where his eyes would be, if he had them. He supposes it's fortunate that he has yet to find himself in a situation where it’s necessary to explain _exactly_ how it feels when a human’s life is about to be snuffed out and he’s dispatched to harvest their souls.

In addition to its complexities, the feeling he gets when it's time to reap isn't always the most accurate. A vast majority of the time, he’s found over the years, the souls really are ripe for the picking: their mortal forms have expired, without a doubt, and it’s his job to send them to Judgment. Less common is when he comes across someone who’s merely having a brush with death; their experiences bring them to the brink, and a reaper must observe carefully to determine whether or not someone truly is about to die.

The fallout of reaping a soul that isn’t meant to be taken is the same as failing to reap a soul that needs to be harvested: terrible.

Regardless of how it feels, the sensation is deeply ingrained into every fiber of his being. The human world is a fickle one with death running rampant, and he’s well aware that his existence will never cease to be.

The tingling sensation amplifies radically once he's in close proximity to a mark, and as he phases into tangibility alongside the soul calling out to him, he immediately notices the bland, white walls of a hospital room. His wispy form gives a fine tremor as it aligns with the elderly man resting in a medical cot. An easy job, then. Those who die of old age are more peaceful to reap than others; their souls have experienced a full life and are closer to Judgment, and he needs only to offer a helping hand to guide them along.

But taking the lives of humans truly isn't the easiest of jobs, and he learned long ago to forcibly stifle the uneasiness that comes with what's required of him on a regular basis. Reapers exist only to ferry souls to Judgment when their mortal forms die. They have but one purpose, and despite how he often finds the dealings of death unsavory, he knows he’s no different.

 

* * *

 

It’s a busy day for death, he muses. Over the course of a human day, he’s worked tirelessly to deliver souls to Judgment, and while he doesn’t require sleep in the way that mortals do, fatigue still arrives without any form of respite.

His magic teleports him to where he’s needed next, and immediately he is hit with the sensation that indicates he’s in the right place.  
  
Working for so long has left him feeling weary despite his immortality, and the feeling only intensifies when he sees whose soul he’s meant to reap next. All of a sudden, it’s too much. He’s struck by how revolting his work is, and it takes a moment to bury the loathing that threatens to overtake him. The only time he’s ever truly thankful for not possessing a physical body is during the actual moment of reaping, because he's positive that otherwise he'd throw up every last bit of acid in his stomach during some of the less savory reapings. It takes a substantial amount of effort to shove it down and give his mark his full, undivided attention. She deserves that, if nothing else.

The girl can't be any older than fifteen. It’s jobs like this that makes him regret having free will — being a mindless servant of death would be preferable to the disgust he feels when it’s time to reap the soul of a human too young to have fully lived their life.

It’s more a mockery of free will than anything else, anyway, because he doesn’t _truly_ have a choice. If it’s this girl’s time to die, then he will, without a doubt, swing his scythe to send her soul to Judgment. He has no option but to obey, because the calamitous outcome would be much more tragic, in the long run.

He watches as she continues to sit there, legs dangling off the edge of a park bench.

Humans can't see him, and so he hangs around her close enough to see that she's fiddling with what looks like some kind of coin or trinket. Sometimes he can tell exactly how the reaping's going to go without even brushing a hand against his target's body. When they're older and there are no immediate threats nearby, it’s easy enough to determine the cause of death as a heart attack, or a stroke, or something caused by their body shutting down naturally.

Hostile situations aren't too hard to parse, either — when he phases into something like a police shootout, it isn’t too difficult to sense a victim is highly likely. It's become something of a game — morbid, he knows, but it's not as though he has many choices available for ways to cope with the death that constantly surrounds him — to figure out just what circumstances are going to bring him to the moment he summons his scythe and rends their souls from human flesh.

This girl, though, he’s not so sure about. There doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger; the park is cleared out as the sun dips low beyond the horizon, and it’s a peaceful evening. Unless she’s about to get hit by a car, or run into a murderer, he’s not too sure about this one’s cause of death.

"Long day?" he hears her say, and he sweeps his gaze around the immediate vicinity to see who she’s speaking to. His previous evaluation of the situation stands, though — there’s nobody around except for the young girl and himself.

The idea of her actively seeking him out is preposterous, though, and he dismisses it immediately. Humans can’t see reapers unless they’re on the brink of death, and while her time is coming soon (or else he wouldn’t be here) she doesn’t appear to be dying just yet.

He rarely talks aloud — there’s nobody to converse with, and the low, desolate timbre that resonates whenever reapers speak tends to be fairly off-putting to anyone in close enough proximity to hear it — but he has to admit that his curiosity is piqued. "Are you... talking to me?"

The brunette turns her head, making a show of looking around the completely deserted park. "I don't see anyone here but us. I know you types usually aren't visible to the naked eye, but if I’m missing anyone else skulking around, feel free to let me know.”

Her words indicate her awareness of the paranormal, and they make him pause. She’s right that there’s nobody else around, but it’s peculiar for her to strike up a conversation with a reaper even if he is the only one nearby to chat with.

It’s more than peculiar, if he’s being honest. It’s downright _strange._

On top of the girl’s strangeness, it’s a bad idea to talk with a mark of his. There's the slim chance that he's only been called out because she's about to have a near-death experience, rather than a full-on soul reaping, but either way, getting involved is dangerous for the both of them.

Nobody with half a brain talks to reapers.

"Aren't you afraid of me?" The words are quiet, but his question is more honest than anything else. Talking to a future victim humanizes her in a way that makes him feel so completely discomfited, and _damn it all_ , there’s a reason he avoids getting attached.

"You mean, am I afraid of death?” she asks, her tone light despite the darkness of her words.

He doesn't deign her question with an answer.

"Of course I am," she continues. "But I figure I'm alright as long as I don't touch you."

He's heard this before, from other paranormals. Reapers aren't the most social of creatures, and their dealings with death have created a healthy fear among those with the ability to die. Most beings these days seem to believe that merely brushing against a reaper’s form is enough to bring death, and those among his kind haven’t seen fit to rectify such a myth. The myths surrounding reapers do well to protect them as well as the mortals whose souls they reap, and he is overly aware of how bad an idea it is to pursue this conversation.

"That's," he starts, and has no idea why he's even telling her at all. Maybe it's because she's about to die, or that she's the first person to talk to him in as long as he can remember. "That's a lie. Uh, about us."

She finally turns her gaze toward him, and he can see the distinctive look of interest glinting in her eyes. "What is, exactly?"

"Touching a reaper won't kill you," he says. "We need a weapon to reap souls."

He considers summoning his scythe for a demonstration, but thinks better of it. She'll see it soon enough, when her time comes.

"I've never met a reaper before." Her palms hit the flat wood of the bench and she pushes off and into a standing position. "Is this your only form? Can you shapeshift at all, like a were?"

"No," he says slowly, not sure where she's going with this all. "If I were to touch you now, I could determine your exact cause and time of death." He doesn't, though, because it's a horrible feeling to see a life in such exact, clinical detail and he already knows that her time is almost up. "These powers run through my being, and this body is the only one I've known."

"Huh." She seems deep in thought, nibbling on the nail of her thumb. "Hey, are you busy? I have an idea.”

He freezes shock-still at her words. He’s not so inept at interaction that he can’t decipher when someone is requesting his time — well, he’s gleaned enough from observing those around him —

The girl plows on, as though she hasn’t noticed his lack of response yet. "By the way, do you have a name? Is there some kind of hierarchy for your kind?"

He feels dizzy with lack of comprehension. What is this girl doing? If he didn't know any better, he'd say she seemed... _interested._ Interested in reapers, interested in him. It's not a feeling he's used to, and something akin to a shudder travels through him. If she knows about the creatures that walk among humankind, then why isn’t she avoiding a death reaper with every fiber of her being? She’s got to be clever enough to realize that he brings only bad omens. Or maybe this — this _curiosity,_ this naivety of those around her — is what gets her killed?

"I've never had a name," he says quietly. Some of the reapers he's crossed paths with have chosen identities, but most servants of death distance themselves from anything even resembling the capriciousness of humanity.

She frowns, as though unhappy with the answer. "Hm. That doesn't seem fair. How do you interact with others without an identity of your own?"

He's well aware that her questions are far too prying, and that he should back off immediately before he does something as stupid as get attached to someone who's about to die — who he is, essentially, about to kill. Still, he can't help but respond. It's the most interaction he's had since his inception, when his mentor had left him to begin his work. "You seem to know a little bit about us. Not exactly the most social creatures," he says, and a rough noise that almost sounds like a laugh escapes him.

"Shit," she curses. "Speaking of identities, I totally forgot to introduce myself. I'm Pidge. There's something I want to try, so you don't mind coming along with me for a bit, do you?"

Seeing as she's the entire reason he's here, he doesn't see any reason to deny her request. Maybe whatever she gets up to is what causes her untimely demise.

(There's a tiny but _loud_ part of him that's preening at even the slightest bit of contact with a living, breathing thing that isn't positively terrified of his very existence, and he reasons that prolonging such a thing won't have too many lasting consequences.)

He trails behind her as they walk through the park and through a residential neighborhood he's unfamiliar with. His jurisdiction is big, and he finds himself discovering more and more of his assigned land the longer he works. Most of the time, he phases into the local hospital, or the winding freeway that cuts across his area and has a rather high mortality rate, but it's not completely out of the ordinary to follow souls into their living areas.

"Make yourself at home," Pidge says as they walk up to a nondescript house that looks just like the others on the block, but the moment they cross the threshold he's hit with the sensation of raw magic. This house must be warded, then, which explains a bit: even if the girl is human, she clearly dabbles in magic enough to detect a being like him. In the entrance of the home, there's a family photo of four smiling, sandy-haired humans, and he gazes down at their visages.

"We're all human," Pidge says from behind him. "My mom comes from a long line of alchemical mages and my dad got roped into the family business when they got married. My brother and I have been practicing since we were kids."

That explains the magic he felt after walking through the door frame. Charms, wards, and spells are often of no use to higher beings like angels and reapers, who have their own reservoirs of magic, but they're remarkably advantageous to mortals. A business meant to convenience those who are not proficient in the magical arts is rare in this day and age, but isn't unheard of.

"I have this idea," she says. "Look — _ugh,_ it's going to be impossible talking to you unless I have a name — "

Her gaze cuts to the living room wall, which has what looks like charmed artifacts hanging from it. He's not entirely sure he wants to know where some of those came from, let alone what they're enchanted to kill.

"I'm going to call you Lance,” she says after a moment, eyes drifting over one of the weapons that, he realizes with a jolt, has suddenly become his namesake. Her words are loud and meaningful, and he's stunned by them. Nobody has ever done something so profound for him, and there's a strange, unfamiliar emotion coursing through his ethereal form that he thinks help him to understand what the word _nauseous_ means.

It almost seems unreal — this girl picking out a name for him based on some inanimate object nearby... But he's too starstruck to find it comical in even the slightest bit, because does she even comprehend what she's _done?_

"Lance," he murmurs, just to hear the word aloud coming from his own voice. He brings a shadowy hand up to gesture at himself. "My name is... Lance?"

"Yeah," she starts, looking far too excited considering the fact that she just _named a reaper._ "Stay here, Lance! I'll be back in a few after I check my supplies and run through a few spells."

He has no plans to go anywhere, and agrees reluctantly, still feeling shellshocked by what's just happened.

“This is a bad idea,” he says out loud to the empty room once she's left, but even vocalizing it doesn't motivate him enough to leave. She might as well have leashed him with the single word — he's effectively stuck here at this young girl's mercy, which means he’s in trouble.

Hours pass, but time means little to him and he settles for dozing in the half-conscious state that overtakes him when there are lulls between reapings. Mulling over the fact that he's been given a name, an _identity,_ fills up the space in a way that feels much too comfortable for how new a sensation it is.

He —  _Lance,_ he thinks to himself firmly, trying to get used to the name — is only snapped out of the daze when he senses a human approaching, and he comes back to himself just in time to see the front door slam open unceremoniously.

“Katie!” a loud voice yells as the door hits the wall loudly, and Lance sees a brunet ram his shoulder against the doorframe as he props an unconscious figure against the structure of the house. "Katie, I need your help!"

Quick footsteps pad down the hallway, and Pidge appears, glasses askew and hands covered in some sort of shimmery, almost-translucent powder. “Matt? Is everything okay?”

This... _Matt_ is taller and less lean than Pidge, but their likeness is uncanny, and Lance recognizes him from the family photo. He’s Pidge's (Katie's?) brother, then.

Of more immediate interest to him, however, is the tall, knocked out form of the figure currently draped over Matt's frame. Lance is overcome with curiosity as he watches Pidge dart forward and relieve some of the man's weight off of her brother's shoulders.

"Holy shit, what _happened?_ Come on, we'll bring him to your room. I think Mom stocked up our healing spells, I'll grab them in a sec!"

Careful not to touch either of the humans as they drag the unconscious being down the hall and into what Lance presumes is a bedroom, he can't help but point out the obvious: “What are you doing with an angel?”

 

* * *

 

What Matt is doing with an angel, apparently, is dragging him into his bedroom to let him enjoy his newly-comatose state on a comfortable queen-sized bed. He's not sure if the angel is the victim of some sort of strange kidnapping scheme or what, but he can hear Pidge hissing something under her breath that informs him the angel's name is Shiro and he is apparently friends of these crazy siblings.

Lance isn't entirely sure what to do — angels are technically his ally, but there isn't really much he can do unless the two humans start trying to experiment on the angel. His magic is mostly defensive — he's incapable of experiencing death himself, but should other paranormals try to interfere with the natural process of mortality, he has enough magic to repel them for long enough to perform his own duties.

He stays quiet as Matt and Pidge move Shiro to what Lance presumes is Matt's bedroom. They don't take too long between the two of them, but the drag of Shiro's damaged wing against the wooden floors is deafening.

It's a form of loss even Lance is unfamiliar with, and he has no idea what to say or do.

When the two siblings return to the wide, open room of their home that Lance has been residing in, he moves to — what? Placate them? Offer words of assurance? He freezes, realizing just how idiotic he's being. He's a facilitator of _death,_ which mortals typically shy away from — for _good reason_ , his mind hisses. There is nothing for him to do here but bide his time until Pidge screws up and he can fulfill his God-damned job.

"Katie," Matt says slowly, and Lance watches as he takes his glasses off, rubs at them with the hem of his shirt, and pushes them back over the bridge of his nose to stare wide-eyed at the intangible haze of Lance's body. "Care to explain why there's a reaper sitting on our living room couch?"

"Well, he's not technically _sitting,"_ she starts before flinching at the glare he shoots her. "Ugh, talk about throwing stones in glass houses. You brought home an angel, why is it such a big deal that I found a reaper and he followed me home like a lost puppy?"

"Hey," Lance says, because he's pretty sure that being referred to as a _lost puppy_ is not a compliment. The two siblings continue to bicker as though he hasn't said a thing.

"Probably because reapers of death are a little bit different than stray dogs?"

"I can't believe this. There is _literally_ an unconscious angel on your bed right now and you're trying to lecture me."

"Fallen angel," Lance pipes up. He's used to being forgotten and ignored, but these two are something else.

Matt's head snaps toward him so quickly he's sure the human is suffering whiplash. "What?"

He thought it was fairly obvious, but maybe these humans aren't as well-versed in the realm of the paranormal as they think they are? "Those injuries on his arm and wing. Angels are immortal creatures," he says, trying not to flinch away at the intense focus of both Pidge and Matt's gazes on him. He's supremely unused to this much undivided attention on him, and it feels strange. Not entirely unpleasant, but he has to resist the instinctive urge to cower and disappear. "Only powerful magic could've hurt him that badly. Like, divine magic, or some potent black magic. I'd be willing to consider the latter if not for the fact that his wing's been damaged — that's definitely a mark of angelic power. Rendering his wings useless means he'll never fly again."

Reapers and angels have a tentative alliance, just as reapers do with devils. The former tend to be loners and remain unattached from other paranormals, even those of their own kind, but Lance can distinctly recall when he was brought into existence — he'd been given a rundown on the basics of supernatural dynamics and politics, especially one so closely entwined with his own responsibility.

Angels tend to be fairly fatalist about everything they do, though, and as a collective they look down on reapers. While Lance hasn't had many opportunities to interact with angels outside of typical work transactions regarding carting souls off to Judgment, he does not have a particularly high opinion of the divine beings given some of the stories he's heard, but he'll keep that bit to himself.

"That idiot," Matt grits out, and Lance can smell blood in the air. He realizes belatedly that Matt's fists are clenched hard enough that his nails are biting into the palms of his hands hard enough to bleed. "He fell from grace for me?"

"Hey," Pidge says, and her voice is soft in a way that makes Lance feel like an outsider that doesn't belong anywhere near these humans. "I don't know what happened, but I'm sure whatever Shiro did was for a good reason. You guys can talk it over when he wakes up, okay?"

"If he does at all."

"What does that mean?" It's Matt who asks, and despite the fact that Lance has spent an indeterminable amount of time observing those around him, he still can't quite decipher the look on his face.

"Falling from grace is a pretty big shock to the system," Lance says, trying to remember as much as he can from what he's been told. "Losing a huge portion of your magic can be traumatizing, even through immortality, and many angels don’t recuperate. Depending on the damage, your... Shiro may never recover. It's unorthodox, but I could probably pull some strings to relieve his suffering for you."

"No," Matt says immediately, words clipped. "That's not an option. Shiro will wake up, and he'll be fine."

Lance shrugs in response. It's not very likely, and he says as much aloud.

To his surprise, the brunet lunges toward him, stopped short only by the tight grip of Pidge's hand around his forearm.

"Matt, _don't touch him_ —"

"Or what, Katie?" Matt snarls. "He'll kill me like he just offered to kill _Shiro?"_

"No, you idiot! That's a rumor, anyway, but I'm fairly sure you don't want to know exactly when you're going to die, so it's a good idea to _back off_."

Matt looks between them, jerking his arm out of Pidge's grasp. "Get your pet project out of here before Mom and Dad come home," he says through gritted teeth, and the glare he shoots Lance brooks no argument as to who exactly he's speaking about. Then he's gone, storming down the hallway.

Lance doesn't understand it at all, but then again, he's never been too familiar with those who believe that things like hope and faith will divert the inevitability of death.

"He'll be okay," Pidge reassures him, but he can tell she's trying to convince herself just as much as him. "He's just upset. Do reapers... interact much with others? Most of what I've heard is lore, and you already corrected me once, so I'd like to make sure I'm getting my facts straight."

Maybe the strange twinge that courses through him at her words is similar to what Matt is feeling right now? "No," he says, and it comes out sounding a bit too honest. "You're... the first who has even spoken to me in what's probably been... decades, by your time standards?"

 _"What?"_ she hisses. "I mean, it's clear your conversational skills are rusty because of how easily you just pissed off Matt, but —  _decades?"_

She's done more than just speak to him, but Lance manages not to say that aloud. She'd given him a _name._ Lance has no idea how long she's going to live, but this isn't an interaction he thinks he'll ever forget. He'll carry _Lance_ with him for the rest of eternity.

"Anyway," Pidge says after a moment, exhaling loudly before waving a hand about in the air. "We have time to work on that. I have some good news and wanted to tell you sooner, but I wasn't expecting Matt to drop in with a fallen angel."

Lance is a little bewildered by how drastically her mood shifts, but he leans in attentively as she grins, bright and earnest.

"I think I can figure out a way to give you a human body."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING PLS LOOK AT [THIS BEAUTIFUL ART](https://twitter.com/sootttea/status/808492539221135360) BRON CREATED OF LANCE
> 
> After you've done that, you're all clear to read on! We hope you enjoy it.

"Gross," Pidge says, looking down at the flesh currently peeling off Lance's arm. It's grotesque, the way the skin curls and falls away from his outstretched appendage. After detaching from his body, it dissolves into black smoke; thankfully, it doesn't bring Lance any pain, although the visual image is a rather unpleasant one.

"I'm guessing this trial's another failure," Lance says, moving to slip the bright metal ring off his quickly-deteriorating hand. Once it's removed, the tanned flesh covering his body dissipates into nothing, leaving behind his familiar incorporeal form.

She groans in response, clearly frustrated. "I really thought that would work! I found some runes on restrictive properties that seemed like they would hold the form well."

"Hey, I think it held for two minutes? That's a new record," he offers reassuringly.

Pidge levels him with a flat look. "This is meant to be a permanent thing, unless you're okay with removing the charm every few minutes while your flesh peels away."

"I'm not really averse to it," he shrugs, but then realizes that most of the general population probably _doesn't_ go unfazed by vicious and regular displays of gore. He concedes the point.

"Stay here," she says, like he has anywhere else to go. "I'm gonna go fiddle with some of the ingredients — I think the spider silk is still pretty promising." Pidge holds out her hand and Lance obediently drops the seemingly harmless ring into her open palm, careful to avoid brushing against her bare skin.

She leaves for the lab built beneath the foundations of their home, and Lance turns his attention toward one of the several books on etiquette purchased by various members of the Holt family for him. (He used to go along with her, too curious about the process of developing charms and spells to leave her be, but apparently Pidge's penchant for not being horrified by a reaper's presence didn’t carry over to when she was deep in the midst of working. He's been yelled at far too many times for being a _hovering distraction,_ and he's since learned to avoid bothering her while she's crafting.)

Time passes quickly as Pidge works. This has become something of a habit between the two of them — she meddles with magic and alchemy to try and craft a charm to contain Lance's intangible body while he bides his time and hopes for her success. The task she's assigned herself is nothing too big, just a feat that nobody's ever successfully done — or probably even _attempted_ — before.

She mutters to herself when she's deep in concentration, and will go for hours on end without eating or drinking unless forced to take a break. Lance isn't an expert on how to help humans survive, and is much more familiar with taking their lives rather than protecting them, but he's quickly come to care for Pidge, and fortunately it didn't take too long to research how and when to remind her to respond to her mortal body's needs. Sometimes, she seems to be on the verge of exhaustion, overworking herself until she can't read the blurring words on spellbooks or her hands begin to shake far too much to safely handle volatile ingredients. With her parents often gone on business, Lance wonders who would take care of her if he wasn’t around.

It's been months since he first stepped through the shadows and into Pidge's life, and she’s shown no sign of giving up on this self-driven quest. He doesn't know how she does it — every failed charm he tries on means more time wasted, more costly spell reagents thrown away or rendered unusable, but still, he believes. It's harder on the days where the failures mount up, but while Lance hasn’t known her for very long, it’s obvious that she's entirely convinced that there _is_ a way to give him a human form.

Anyway, her persistence and determination have him just about convinced that it _is_ possible. If anyone can do it, it's this unassuming brunette girl with a glint in her eye and silver dust smeared across the bridge of her nose.

It's not just Pidge that has him awed, either. Both of her parents welcomed him into their home with open arms — he doesn't need to sleep, but Pidge's mother had offered him the spare bedroom, and it isn't as though he's _incapable_ of resting on a bed. It’s a luxury he isn’t too inclined to give up now that he's experienced it. They are a bit more wary around him, although it isn't something Lance really blames them for. It actually makes him respect them a bit more, because they're clearly far more sane than their fearless daughter is about his presence; rumors of reapers hold a fair amount of falsehood, but his continued existence around them is definitely associated with latent threat. And Matt — Matt's another story, but Lance thinks he's finally starting to warm up to him.

Every day that he observes the Holt family he learns something new, and Lance wouldn't trade the comfortable lifestyle he's settling into for anything. A magic-tinged voice in his mind hisses frequently about how dangerous it is to spend all of his free time around humans that will die in what is virtually a blink of the eye to him, but Lance willingly trades this fleeting moment of happiness for the inevitable sorrow.

He's snapped out of his musings as a distinct tingling radiates throughout his being. Moving toward the mouth of the stairway that leads into the Holt workshop, he hopes Pidge can hear his raised voice beyond the tight bubble of focus she develops when she's working particularly hard.

"I've got to go for a bit. Get some rest, okay? I can tell you're running yourself ragged." Lance knows that there's no way he could leave her for good — he's broken all of his rules and gotten attached, and he'll hang around for as long as the Holts will have him. Even if every single one of Pidge's attempts at rendering him a human body fail, she's going to have to try a lot harder than that to get rid of him, now.

He's in the middle of phasing out in to where his next reaping's located, but Lance doesn't miss Pidge's playfully yelled, "I don't need another dad, Lance!"

 

* * *

 

There's a lot that he's never experienced in the human world, but he's learning. Watching is all he's ever been able to do — for as long as he can remember, Lance has yearned to interact with those around him, and the closest he's come has involved carefully observe the mortals surrounding him.

Pidge was the one to finally push him over the edge and into finally _interacting_ with others, becoming a part of their life, but Lance has been watching them for a long, long time. It had taken a few days of hanging around Pidge to realize that she wasn't on the cusp of death. None of them are entirely sure what caused Lance's instincts to hone in on her, but he has a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with the unconscious angel lying on Matthew Holt's bed.

And one of the things he's observed since unceremoniously moving in with the Holts is that there's something _off_ about Matt. At first, Lance had assumed he'd just given him a wide berth because of what he is, but the more he interacts with Pidge's brother, the more convinced he is that there's something else going on.

He has all the time in the world to figure it out, too.

"Hey," Lance says as Matt walks through the front door after finishing up a delivery. Pidge is downstairs, tinkering some more with charms, and Lance is eager to see what he can pry from her brother while she's occupied.

Predictably, Matt flinches as soon as he hears Lance's greeting. He's still unsure as to whether or not it's an instinctive reaction to the aura of darkness that pulses off of Lance's being, or if it's something else entirely, but he has every intention of finding out.

He watches Matt's shoulders relax, as though he's deliberately forcing his muscles to uncoil. "Hi, Lance."

Lance isn't sure why Pidge hasn't said anything about the weight Matt has clearly lost. His clothes hang off his frame in a way they hadn't six months ago when he'd first met the human. He’s thinner, more jumpy, and he can’t help the growing curiosity. What could have caused such a shift in behavior?

Surely this isn't all the result of him losing his angel friend?

"How's it going?" he asks lightly, because Pidge had told him he'd mastered the art of colloquial conversation a few months back.

Matt looks at him for a moment, considering. His gaze is heavy, calculating, and in moments like these Lance is reminded of Pidge. That's technically incorrect, though, he supposes — Matt's the older sibling, and therefore her mannerisms must have been learned through him. Either way, it's reassuring to see a semblance of normality coming from the man, especially when he spends so much time flinching away from loud noises or avoiding interaction all—together. "Fine," he says, finally. "I've got work to do, if you don't mind."

Lance realizes he's standing in the doorframe that separates the living room from the hallway, and drifts out of the way. When Matt passes by him, he tests a theory by reaching out toward the human’s back with a tendril of magic. It trails behind him invisibly but with clear purpose.

Matt takes a few more steps before freezing, unnaturally still. There's no plausible way Lance could have missed his sharp gasp and the following shudder that seems to wrack his entire body, but then Matt hisses a breath through clenched teeth and moves into his room quickly, slamming the door behind him.

_Interesting._

He doesn't have much time to ponder it, though, because he’s distracted by a tugging on the wards he's become accustomed to, indicating the arrival of someone — probably Pidge's parents, given the time of day.

"Lance," Pidge calls out. She's still downstairs, and he heads toward the stairs to respond. It's not like he can't hear her perfectly from where he's at, but humans don't have such acute senses as his kind do.

"I need you to distract my parents for a bit," she continues from the bottom of the stairwell. "They weren't meant to be home for another hour, and I need to grab a couple of things from lockup."

"You mean their heavily warded storage, full of dangerous and rare substances?"

"Oh, I figured how to get around those ages ago. I just need them to avoid the workshop for a few minutes, you in?"

Lance nods, before realizing she likely can't see him. "Yeah," he says. Of course he will. He's pretty sure he'd do anything for her.

"Thank you!" she chirps.

He thinks he’d be smiling, if he could be, and gets to work.

 

* * *

 

Lance can recall the day it happens with perfect clarity. Some of his older memories blur together after too much time has passed — surely a consequence of being an immortal, but _this_ memory… This one will never leave him, he’s sure.

It's a cold day, with winter in full force. He doesn’t feel the chill himself — the spirits of reapers are much too hardy to fret about such fickle things as the temperature of the air — but the humans he live with have taken to bundling up in several layers of clothing while heated air pushes through the air vents. Snowflakes swirl about the air, drifting to the ground as Lance watches a family frolic about outside and play in the snow. They’re obviously human, auras too pure to be influenced by the familiar imprint of magic, and he’s amused by the way two of the younger kids launch snowballs at one another before running and hiding behind the legs of their parents.

Lance is surrounded by death, but sometimes it is a thrill to simply watch _life_ in its purest form.

"Okay," Pidge says with a huff as she climbs the stairs, and she’s almost bouncing with excitement. “Try this one.”

She sets what looks like a complicated ring on the nearby table, and Lance peers down at it before taking it. It’s a thick ring made from some kind of light-colored wood, but there’s a strip of silvery metal running down the middle of it that gleams when it hits the light.

“It’s holly and iron,” Pidge explains. “I’ll spare you the gory details, but the holly enhances both of our magic while the iron stabilizes and promotes energy from the other ingredients.  Now try it on!”

How she can still be so excited about this trial after they’ve failed countless times before, he isn’t sure. Obediently, though, he slips the ring onto the hazy approximation of a finger.

There’s a moment where nothing happens, and Lance tries not to be too disappointed. This isn’t the first time one of Pidge’s attempts at stabilization have garnered a complete lack of results, but as he moves to dislodge the ring, she gasps.

“Wait,” Pidge says, eyes wide behind the circular glasses perched on her nose.

He waits, and then watches in disbelief as the hazy swirl of darkness that constantly surrounds him seems to get sucked up, as though through a vacuum. It's a bizarre feeling, not unlike when he's in the middle of shadow-stepping through the hazy nether in order to arrive at a reaping, but this time there’s a twinge of _something_ that he’s never quite experienced before.

It spreads throughout his entire being until there’s absolutely no trace of the murky darkness he’s had from the day of his inception.

"Pidge," he starts, voice cracking on the single word, and immediately he freezes. There's a certain timbre that comes along with reaping; a depth that speaks of death and deeply-rooted magic that resonates when reapers speak, and Lance — Lance can't hear that when he speaks. He repeats her name, because she's just staring at him, and saying her name aloud confirms it: something about his voice has changed.

"Holy shit," she says finally, and a grin sprawls across her features so wide that it threatens to crack her face in two. "It _worked."_

"It worked?" Lance repeats, panic rising. His chest feels tight, and it's getting hard to breathe, but — those are things he's never had to deal with before. It's uncomfortable, almost painful, and that — that means —

He scrambles up and off the bed, almost tripping over the long legs beneath him that, _fuck,_ he's controlling on his own —

Once he's on his feet, Lance reaches out — to touch, to feel, to engage a real human being in physical contact, but Pidge flinches, and his hand — he has a _hand_ now, and it’s dark and black and there’s a fuzziness surrounding it but it’s still a _hand_ — freezes shock-still in the air.

"No, no, no," she says quickly, waving her hands around frenetically. "I don't — it's not that I don't want to touch you, but this charm was only a stabilizer for a body. Your powers are still active, and I’ll need to work out a few glamours to give you skin and hair, but that’ll take some more experimentation. Easier than this for sure, though. Afterwards I can work out something to bottle up your magic when you’re in this form, okay?”

It’s a lot of information to take in at once, and the swell of disappointment in his chest that had formed at Pidge’s recoil quickly dissolves into something quieter but also _ecstatic._

He can _feel,_ he realizes with a start that physically jerks his body. Human emotions, which have always eluded him, are currently fit to bursting out of his heart, and with a quick jerk of his head, he looks down to see that he has a chest, and arms that taper off with widely splayed hands. There's a rush of energy through his body that has his heart pounding so quickly he can hear the dull thud of it in his newly-formed _ears,_ and it’s wonderful and bewildering and awe-inspiring.

When he rushes over to a mirror on wobbly but _tangible_ legs, he stares at himself to see that his eyes are a dazzling blue that glow out of the dark shadow of his head, and he feels dizzy with incredulity.

"Thank you," he breathes, trying to understand the strange prickling that almost _hurts_ coming from behind his eyes.

This is more than he ever thought possible, even in a world full of magic and wonder.

 

* * *

 

Pidge continues to exceed any and all of Lance’s expectations. It seems unfathomable to him that the paranormal community hasn’t realized just how frighteningly intelligent and sharp she is, but he’s certainly not about to tell someone who would force her to use her mind in a terrible way.

And anyway, who would he go to?

Even Pidge doesn’t seem to fully comprehend the stabilizer she’s crafted — he’d been told all of the components that went into composing the ring that now rests permanently on the middle finger of his right hand, but neither of them accounted for the fact that his body only seems to retain _some_ of the needs that a typical human mortal has.

When he actively utilizes his magic, the stabilizer weakens. The darkness that had receded previously returns in full-force, surrounding him in the haze he’s grown familiar with over the centuries, although for some reason Pidge doesn’t seem defeated by the fact that she has to tend to his stabilizer on a frequent basis to ensure its effectiveness remains. It actually seems to encourage her to find more solutions to what she deems to be a problem, and that kind of persistence is one of the most terrifying things about her.

Additionally, Lance can _sleep_ now, and the days seem much more valuable now that he’s actually experienced the sensation rather than spending every moment of his existence awake. He understands now why humans value the daytime so much — when they succumb to the needs of their bodies and spend up to eight hours asleep every night, waking hours seem much more significant.

Food isn’t a requirement, but Lance pretends it is one because human food is _incredible._ He has _tastebuds,_ and garlic knots quickly make their way up on his list of requirements for survival. One of his favorite foods is a flaky pastry that one of Pidge’s friends made — by _hand,_ apparently. Pidge’s dad had apparently done a favor for him and had received the treats that Lance swears came directly from Heaven itself, and he makes it a priority to meet this _Hunk_ person, if only to bargain with them and find out just how to encourage them to make more pastries immediately and for the rest of all eternity.

(The worst part of eating and drinking is the resulting bodily functions, but Lance had experienced one of those during one of Pidge’s botched trials when he'd ended up writhing on the floor, vomiting up his freshly-conjured organs until he’d managed to remove the charm with shaking, barely tangible hands. Puking is _definitely_ not something he’d like to experience again.)

Within two weeks, she’s managed to put together a few glamours that further grant him the appearance of a human. They’re a damned marvel of magical technology, in Lance’s opinion, and he'd like nothing more than to never have to remove them again. He’s aware that the longer he wears the charms and glamours, the more maintenance they’ll require, but he still hasn’t come up with a sufficient way to _thank_ Pidge for the positively priceless gift she’s given him.

His hands — human hands, covered with a layer of dark skin and _creases_ where his fingers and wrists bend — are heavy with rings of wood and silver, but it’s a small price to pay for the facade of mortality.

It’s not just his looks, either. Lance is distinctly aware that he is a reaper and forevermore will remain one, but when he looks in a mirror and catches clear blue eyes and messy brown hair atop his head instead of a hazy, shapeless darkness, he _feels_ human, and that’s a more important than he thinks anyone really realizes.

The Holts had been accepting even in his reaper form, but they settle into a familial bond once he’s acquired a human body. Sometimes, it feels a bit too close to pretending, to playing house, but Lance ignores it, because right now, he’s _happy._

 

* * *

 

Lance happens to be hanging around the house when Shiro's aura pulses suddenly throughout the building. It’s a harsh, powerful blast that almost staggers him, and he freezes for a moment, his human form instinctively recoiling from the lashing out of power.  He's absurdly thankful that none of the Holts are currently home. That kind of power runoff could've affected a human rather negatively — as it is, Lance's skin is riddled with goosebumps. It makes him wonder for a moment if his previous evaluation was incorrect: how could an out-of-commission angel expend that much magical energy?

It’s worth investigating, at least, and he moves toward Matt’s room without even really thinking about it. There’s a shudder of magic as he crosses over the threshold of the bedroom — Lance ponders only briefly why there are additional wards guarding Matt’s specific room when the entire house is protected, but his attention is immediately directed at the very-much-awake angel staring directly at him.

"Uh," he starts, because the angel still lying on Matt's bed has mussed up hair and a wild look in his eyes. It's a bizarre combination, and he’s left speechless for a moment before finally settling on what to say. “Hello there.”

Shiro narrows his eyes thoughtfully at him without saying a word, and Lance takes it all back: he wishes desperately that at least Pidge was here to act as a buffer between the two of them. There’s no way this angel is going to view his presence positively, especially not if he’s friends with the Holts. He’s an absolute stranger to Shiro, and anyway a reaper moving about the house _probably_ isn’t a good omen to an angel who has human friends.

The thought process hits him just as Shiro _launches_ himself off the bed, and Matt’s protective wards go off at the sign of aggression, sending a nasty shiver of magic straight down Lance’s spine.

 _Shit,_ he thinks as he ducks out of the way, because Shiro is a _lot_ taller and broader than he seemed when he was lying unconscious in a bed, and Lance’s legs don’t seem to be working correctly. He’s struck by the realization that he hasn’t quite mastered the movements of this human form yet, and as such his limbs aren’t cooperating fully in this quick, adrenaline-fueled combat, but then he’s _actually_ struck by the flat of Shiro’s fist, which, _ow,_ Lance never wanted to experience pain _this way._

“You’re a _reaper,_ ” Shiro hisses, eyes dark with rage, and he seems so focused on Lance that he hasn’t even noticed the damage done to his arm and wing. “What did you do to _Matt_?”

“Nothing!” he yelps, and scrambles backward to avoid being struck again. The angel doesn’t seem to take his words at face value, though, and readies himself for another attack.

Lance manages to stumble out of Matt’s room in time to dodge the attack, and his body flinches instinctively at the loud  _crack!_ of what is presumably Shiro's fist embedding itself in the drywall. Despite the magical damage inflicted on the right side of his body, his arm seems to be working just fine, and Lance sucks in a ragged breath as he darts down the hallway, Shiro but a half-pace behind him.

He desperately wants to retaliate, to do something more than run, but the hallway is narrow and he’s not going to be able to summon his scythe like this. His mind is working frenetically to figure a way out of this situation — combat isn’t his forte and all defensive magic he can think of conjuring will irreparably damage the house — but it’s hard to _think_ when panic is arcing through his body like an open flame to kindling. 

He never felt like this as a reaper, and it’s overwhelming. Lance gasps for breath as he tears out of the house and into the open nighttime air, Shiro tailing him dangerously close. Something akin to relief grips him like a vice, because now they’re out in the Holts’ backyard, which means he can summon a weapon and fight back.

He’s summoned his weapon for reaping an infinite amount of times, and Lance’s arm sweeps forward in anticipation of grabbing his materializing sickle.

Except — nothing happens. The solid haft of his scythe doesn’t manifest, and he remains just as unarmed as Shiro is. Though, for all the lack of present weapons Shiro has, his punches are still emblazoned with angelic power despite the fact that it’s clearly been weakened by his fall. It’s more than Lance has in this human form, though, and sickening realization hits him as he glances down at his ring-laden fingers.

“Fuck,” he spits out, heart drumming a frantic rhythm. He’s got all of his charms and glamours on, which means that the newer creations of Pidge’s —  suppressors that limit his magic — are in full effect, and he’s so _stupid_ to think he could’ve summoned a weapon like this.

Shiro lets out a roar as he charges Lance again, and he’s too distracted fumbling with his rings to evade the rush  — there’s no way Shiro would react positively if he accidentally slipped off his main stabilizer, and _shit,_ which one was the one to restrict the utilization of his abilities?

Any thoughts about properly identifying his limiters flies from his mind as they both hit the ground hard, air forced out of Lance’s lungs from the impact. There’s a too-strong hand pinning him to the grass as he’s assaulted — thankfully only by fists, rather than the sharp sting of angelic magic, but it’s a negligible blessing — and even as his forearms fly up to block as much as he can. there’s too much going on for him to rationalize that _this is just temporary, there’s no way he could actually_ kill _you —_

But his nervous system is screaming at him to flee, to escape the pain, and he’s riddled with a fear that he’s only ever felt from the victims whose souls he’s reaping. Every emotion shooting through him is unfamiliar, and the pumping of adrenaline does nothing to quell his rising hysteria and desperate need to _survive._

All of it is too much, and Lance chokes out a whimper.

The blows don't stop, raining down on him without mercy in some cruel parody of justice  _—_ an angel forcing death on the defensive, how  _hilarious —_ and it’s a testament to Lance’s frazzled _everything_ that he didn’t even detect the arrival of Matt until he’s slamming open the back door, although the angel striking him doesn’t notice until his name is called out.

“Shiro?” Matt gasps, loud and clear despite the pathetic noises escaping Lance’s throat, and everything _stops._

Lance can hardly think for the overwhelming rush of _feeling_ he’s currently experiencing, and he watches through quickly-blurring eyes as Shiro seems to deflate entirely after hearing the single word.

“Matt,” he says wetly, and Lance has barely blinked before the two are engaged in a tight embrace. He’d like to feel happy for them, distantly recognizing that this is probably a meaningful reunion, but he can’t hear a thing outside of the rush of blood in his head and the frantic throb of his heartbeat, and all of his experiences as a reaper have taught him that it’s more than possible for humans to die because their hearts give out. He wonders if this body is about to break. Will his suppressor shatter, as well?

He isn’t sure how much time passes, but by the time his heart slows into something more steady and less wild, both Matt and Shiro are absent from the backyard. It’s just as well, because he isn’t sure he has the fortitude to step inside the house after the circuit of overstimulation his body’s just gone through. He lies there, staring up at the stars, not sure what to do.

It’s how Pidge finds him, much, much later.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing gets Keith's blood pumping like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends! Sorry this took so long to get out. Just a few things about this chapter: if you want a visual of Keith's bike, we used [this baby](http://images.mcn.bauercdn.com/pagefiles/489740/triumphstreettripler.jpg) for reference. (Look at that Keith color scheme, seriously.)
> 
> Also there's a **trigger warning** for this chap: there is some character death, but this is also a paranormal AU so... it's a temporary character death!? There's also some violence going on, so just a fair warning about that.
> 
> We really hope you enjoy!

Nothing gets Keith's blood pumping like this.

It happens only at night. Going out during the day would be too conspicuous, and anyway the lot of them are far too smart to get caught. There's an entire section of his too-small closet dedicated to these evenings, and Keith feels jittery with excitement as he works through his routine. Dark clothes are ideal because they blend in with the ebony backdrop of the world around him, and he tugs a dark pair of tightly-fitting jeans up and onto his hips before zipping up his jacket.

Keith's knee-high boots are scuffed and well-worn, but they're some of the most comfortable shoes he owns, and he slips them on before grabbing his keys and locking the door to his apartment.  He won't be back until the sun's peeking up over the horizon, which is just the way he likes it.

The night air is crisp, and a chill creeps into his lungs as he inhales, but he's bundled up pretty sufficiently to stave off the bite of wind as he drives, leather jacket tight around his shoulders and riding helmet secured over his head.

Chasing adrenaline is the best way to forget about any potential coldness because of the weather, and as Keith swings a leg over the timeworn seat of his Triumph Street Triple, he feels his heartbeat pick up in anticipation.

These nights really are his favorite.

Driving to the designated location for the night is like a warm-up, a preparation for what’s coming. After ensuring that there are no cops waiting on the side of the road to pull over speeding motorists, he allows himself to go faster, feeling the hum of Red underneath him as she takes on speed. Before he knows it (which probably has something to do with his speedometer hitting an average of 20 mph above the legal speed limit) he's made it to the track. What seems to be a partially overgrown and unused path off the side of the road leads into a veritable wonderland hidden within the forest.

The dull thrum of idle chatter and the heavy bass of music permeate the air: rowdy spectators, both old and obviously new, buzz around the temporary tents erected for tonight’s event, and it’s a familiar scene that typically energizes Keith.

Yet there's something about this night that has him on-edge as he rolls into the designated lot for tonight's race. It's a feeling he can't shake, like something's ominous about to happen — but they have someone hidden deep within the force that always lets it leak if any cops are privy to the locations of their weekly races, so he's fairly confident that they aren't about to get busted.

Still, it's hard to ignore the strange prickling up his spine. He takes the opportunity to quite literally shake himself out of it as he slips his helmet off and shakes out his long hair, which probably looks like a mess after being smushed in the confines of the helmet. Keith settles the helmet on the handlebars, leaning an elbow against it to run fingers through his messy hair. When it seems as tamed as it’s going to get, he slips his phone out of his pocket and scrolls through it for a second before coming across his friend's name.

 _Just got here_ , he texts with numb fingers. He probably should've worn full-length gloves tonight, but the pair of fingerless gloves covering his hands are his favorite, and they're a small comfort that helps him shrug off the strange feeling settling around him. _Where are you?_

 _I'm right behind you_ , his phone buzzes in response, along with an emoji of a ghost. It's dumb, and he rolls his eyes as he dismounts his bike before turning to face his apparent stalker and drawling, "Your face is more terrifying than you knowing it was me pulling in."

"Brat," Rolo says, wrapping an arm around Keith's shoulder and squeezing him too-tight. "Like I wouldn't recognize Red from a mile away." He’s one of the best mechanics Keith has ever used, and he’s trustworthy despite his unkempt appearance and the scruffy blond hair that peeks out from under his ever-present beanie.

Keith scowls and tries to wiggle free, but Rolo's stronger than he is. Working manual labor is certainly working out for the taller man who has at least a head on him in height alone, and it's frustrating. He'll have to start lifting weights again, lest his friend starts calling him scrawny or something equally as stupid. "Let go of me, you brute," he grunts. "Don't know how you can even balance on a bike with all this extra top weight."

"Yeah, yeah. I know you're just jealous," Rolo responds, but he does loosen his grip enough for Keith to slip out from underneath his arm. "How are you feeling about tonight? Tommy's been bragging all night about his new Ducati and I'm really banking on you grinding his trust fund ass into the dust."

"Tommy can sink all the money he wants into a bike, but it doesn't mean shit since he has no idea how to ride."

Rolo grins at him. "I knew there was a reason I always put my money on you."

"Because I'm the best," he says, and maybe there’s a little bit of arrogance there, but it's also _true._ "You coming with me to the mechanic's tent? Want to make sure Red's ready for the race."

"You and I both know she runs perfectly, thanks to my prowess as the greatest mechanic in town," Rolo drawls, overdramatically placing a hand on his chest and bowing forward, but he follows along when Keith starts to move through the lively crowd.

They pass several other racers as they bring Red over to the designated area, and Keith is treated to an equal mix of glares and grins. A fair majority of racers don't think of him very fondly, but — that's their fault, for losing to him so often. If they were more skilled then they'd be grouped with those who aren't such sore losers.

The more seasoned motorists greet him with loud claps on his shoulder and words of excitement, and it's there that Keith _really_ thrives. It helps float his confidence; he knows that he's one of the top racers that consistently appears at these illegal events, and the recognition has him in a great mood.

Then one of Rolo's friends — some greasy-haired guy with a grin that's positively _sleazy_ — bumps against Keith, and he turns to scowl and bite out an insult, but he only makes it so far as turning before he catches eyes with someone from across the lot that he doesn’t recognize.

It isn't that Keith knows every single person that frequents the races — hell, the dumbasses who always bet on anyone other than him are usually people who've never actually seen him race before — but the moment he locks gazes with this guy, it's like he loses control of his entire body.

It's impossible to move, to breathe, to do _anything,_ because the stranger’s eyes are so piercingly blue that it looks like they're glowing in the night's darkness. They seem like they're seeing right into Keith's entire being, and it surpasses strange or interesting or any other word that comes immediately to his mind.

Beyond all else, it's _eerie_ , and it does nothing to quell the feeling that's been rising in the pit of Keith's stomach all evening. When he finally manages to blink, the guy has disappeared into the crowd of bustling race attendees, like he was never there at all.

Fuck, he's never been one to get the yips right before a race, and he's not about to let some random guy with almost-glowing eyes convince him to miss out on getting on his bike and dominating the idiots who think they can outride him.

It was probably in his imagination, anyway. Maybe his eyes had seemed lit up because of another bike's headlights. Yeah, that sounded much more reasonable than _the dude had glowing eyes._

"Hey," Rolo says, and Keith only realizes he's talking after his friend snaps his fingers in front of his face to grab his attention. "You still with me?"

Keith grunts out an affirmative. "Just... getting ready."

Rolo huffs a laugh, crouching down by Red and checking on her naturally exposed inner workings. "Ah, yes. The patented 'stare into the distance like an idiot' pre-race preparation."

He honestly doesn't even have it in him to respond to the snark — the feeling has intensified radically, and Keith feels vaguely nauseous because of it. Sparing one last glance in the direction of the uncanny stranger, he shivers, and it has nothing to do with the cold. Keith clenches his jaw, as though he can stave off the foreboding sensation through sheer will alone.

"What do you think? How does Red look?" he asks, voice distant even to his own ears. He's mostly operating on autopilot, here; these are standard questions he asks Rolo before every race.

"You're good to go," responds Rolo, standing up from his previously crouching position. "She's purring like a cat."

No, not a cat. "A _lion,"_ he corrects, forcing himself to take a deep breath just as someone with a megaphone shouts at the racers to start lining up. It means there's no time to think about how off he feels, but there isn't much to do about that now as the crowd cheers for the start and the thumping music fades to match the hum of idling engines.

"Make me and my wallet proud," his mechanic offers with a fierce smile, and Keith nods before dropping his helmet down onto his head and heading toward the starting line.

The revving of engines just before a race tends to ground him, to steady the rapid pitter-patter of his heartbeat for just a moment before the adrenaline gives him the high he craves as he pushes off of the ground and into the lurch of his bike, but this time, they don't do much to settle Keith's nerves.

Keith's never felt close to other human beings — they're selfish at best and downright cruel at worst — but if there's one thing he does trust, it's his bike. Even if he's feeling a little bit shaken, he believes in her as well as his own skill, and when the flags come down to signal the start of the race, he bolts forward and forces himself to relax against the cold metal of her body.

Motorcycles fly past him, but he's not too worried about it. it's fairly common for the greener racers to believe that speed just out of the gate is all it takes to win a race, but Keith knows better. He trusts in his Triumph, and Red quickly surpasses one, then two of the motorists ahead of him.

It isn't long before Keith has secured a fairly significant lead: he's raced long enough to read the patterns of bikes ahead of him in order to weave between them and outpace pretty much everyone — even Tommy on his stupidly overpriced hunk of Italian metal.

Oddly enough, it's when he can only hear the growl of his own bike that things seem _wrong._ He's certainly alone — nobody else has managed to catch up with him, but Keith can't manage to slow down from his reckless speed.

Despite the fact that his mind is telling him it's okay to ease up, to decelerate the slightest bit because he's much further ahead than the other racers, his body refuses to cooperate. It almost feels like he's running, rather than trying to race the others. As though he can't do anything but speed up, because there's something at his back. As soon as the thought manifests, Keith can't help but upshift.

It's too risky to look behind him and see exactly how far ahead he is, but even though he's confident in his advantage, he can't shake the feeling that there's an adversary just behind him, a hair's breadth away from overtaking him.

Almost before he even takes the turn, Keith knows he's fucked up. It isn't the first time he's overcorrected and leaned too far into a turn, but he's not an idiot: there's no way he's going to be able to shift his body upright enough to compensate for the fact that he's taking this turn way too quickly and sharply.

It happens in just a few seconds, but it might as well be an eternity for all that Keith observes in a split instant through wide eyes.

He looks ahead of him just as the boy he'd seen before — tall, with dark skin and piercing blue eyes — steps onto the track, and he's close enough that Keith can see every detail of the thin line of his lips pressing into a grim frown. A heartbeat passes, but his attention is torn away from the clearly suicidal guy stepping onto a live racetrack because his bike shakes precariously as he rounds the corner, and a loud snarl fills his ears before Red tips over too far and slams into the ground. Momentum and speed combine in a perfectly catastrophic way, sending the both of them flying across the track.

He must black out for a split second as his head cracks against the asphalt, because between what feels like one blink and another, Keith finds himself staring up at the starry sky as pain wracks every ounce of his body.

Nothing seems to make sense. Keith can see his breath puffing into the cold air, his breathing erratic and too-fast, but everything still feels _hot_. His vision is blurry through the massive spiderwebbing cracks spanning the entirety of his helmet's visor, and he can't move.

A loud, keening whine fills the air, and it's a shock to realize that the noise is coming from _him._ It's nearly impossible to move underneath the metal wreckage of his motorcycle, but still he tries futilely to shove it off his body. Keith doesn't allow himself to think about how much it hurts seeing Red in pieces, because the emotional pain hardly compares to the physical trauma he's experiencing.

Fuck, is he going to die like this?

An overloud roaring fills the air, and for the briefest of moments Keith thinks — he doesn't know what he thinks, maybe that the ground is opening up to swallow him whole — but it's only the noise of other racers taking the curve, their bikes responsive and deafening as they pass him.

No one stops to help him, despite the fact that he's thinking it so hard ( _please help, please help, it hurts—_ ), and his sluggish thoughts piece together that the reason he's so hot is that some gas has leaked and caught fire dangerously close to him.

He whimpers pathetically, because like this, there's no way to escape the flames.

It's something he needs not worry about, though, because as he turns his head away from the fire in a failed attempt at escaping the overwhelming warmth, he sees the guy step toward the crash. Keith watches as he waves a hand and summons what looks like a scythe out of thin air. Some kind of black dust surrounds them, and Keith _must_ be dead, or close to it, if he's hallucinating such a thing, but —

The tanned man moves forward, eyes still startlingly blue even in the darkness, until he's standing just over Keith. Their gazes meet again, Keith's likely wracked with agony and the other’s with something that looks like grim determination, before he decisively swings his weapon. The arc of his arm is smooth, and he can’t do anything but track its movement as the scythe swings down at him and embeds directly in Keith's chest.

He flinches, fully expecting such an attack to hurt on top of the current pain he's in, but he feels nothing. There's a gentle tugging as the man dislodges the scythe from his chest, but that's easily ignored because as the weapon slides free of his flesh, so does part of _him._

It's nearly impossible to explain, except for the fact that Keith is now watching himself lie on the ground with this — _reaper of death_ arching over him, and it's concerning but also fairly... relieving, because the pain of his mangled body has left him entirely.

His — soul, maybe? — stays embedded in the scythe when it's pulled away from his body, and Keith sees the exact moment his body falls limp as he's detached from it. Part of him wants to break out in panic, but another part watches in removed interest as the guy crouches beside his body and presses fingers against his bloodied cheek. He murmurs something that sounds suspiciously like an apology.

It doesn't quite make sense, but then again, it feels like sense left the fucking building a long time ago.

Screams and loud exclamations reach his ears (does he even still _have_ ears, like this?) and Keith struggles to try and face them, although it's hard to move with a huge piece of metal run through him. He tries to call out for help as bystanders finally breach the track and run towards the wreckage, but nobody seems to hear him. Even Rolo bolts past him, mere inches away from what should have been his body, but there's nothing like recognition in his eyes, only sheer panic.

Then the reaper reaches toward his weapon again, and the moment his hand closes around the haft of it, Keith feels a searing, crippling heat surrounding him. It's even worse agony than the pain of the actual crash, and he can't help the scream that rips out of his throat.

Torment overtakes him, and Keith's last conscious memory is of vividly glowing blue eyes.

 

* * *

 

When Keith blinks awake, his vision is flooded by overwhelming white. This must be death, he thinks, but as he stares into the brightness the concerns of his body make themselves known. There's no pain, which seems a bit odd given the fact that he apparently witnessed his own death by motor vehicle, but beneath him is the press of cold metal, and his eyes are starting to water from staring into what he belatedly identifies as a light bulb.

Not death, then, but — what could this be? Where is he?

Averting his gaze from the overbright light above him, he tries to piece together how he could have possibly ended up here after being pinned beneath the wreckage of Red. The reminder of his bike being ruined sends a pang through his chest, and his gaze drops to his mangled legs — which definitely did _not_ survive the crash, even if by some miracle he himself did — but as soon as he does, the tips of his toes catch fire and somehow, every inch of his skin ignites.

It's nothing short of horrifying to witness your body being burned alive, Keith quickly learns — the smell of singed flesh is atrocious, and even though the pain is still absent, he can't help but think that maybe _this_ is hell, where he's doomed to watch himself die for all eternity.

But the fire fades as quickly as it appeared, and there's pale, unmarred flesh in its absence, as though the crash had never happened. He lies there, unmoving, for a long stretch of time, trying to comprehend the impossibility.

"Okay," he says finally in an attempt to ground himself, and it's a small blessing that apparently his vocal chords are still working despite whatever the _fuck_ just happened.

Keith pushes himself into a sitting position before swinging his legs and — _oh._ Things suddenly make a lot more sense.

He’s in a morgue, if the several rows of bodies lying on metal mortuary tables is anything to go by. On the farthest wall appears to be some sort of cooler where bodies are also stored. Okay, so. This is fucked up and he needs to vacate the premises immediately. He sucks in a sharp breath, but it's hard to quell the rising hysteria after watching himself spontaneously combust in the middle of a room full of dead bodies.

 _Now's not the time to panic,_ he tries to tell himself. Panicking can wait until he's out of this place and can figure out exactly what the fuck is going on. Keith measures his breaths until they're less ragged and uncontrolled and slides off the metal gurney.

It isn't until he's standing, bare feet pressing against the cold concrete floor, that he notices something feels... _off_. At the base of his spine, something's moving, and Keith turns to look behind him only to have his vision obscured by something deep red and leathery. Poking out of his shoulderblades is a motherfucking _set of wings_ , too small to do something like actually lift him in the air, but definitely present and horrifying and fitted with a thin membrane of webbing stretching between the spines.

As if that wasn't a big enough shock, what rests beneath them is a tail jutting out of his spine, long and dark and tipped with two sets of trident-like, sharp barbs.

And — there's really no way to remain calm after seeing something like _that_ , and so Keith does what any other sane person in his place would do: he panics.

He needs to get out of here, and it's the only still-functioning part of his brain that informs him he is most definitely naked and needs to find something to put on before he flees into a potentially public place.

A set of lockers sits against the farthest wall of the large room, and Keith stumbles toward them on wobbly legs. It's irritating when he realizes that they’re all padlocked shut, and he slams his hands against them in frustration.

Keith can’t really control his surprise when the metal gives easily underneath his hands, but the panic continues to rise and there isn't _time_ to really register the way his  _clawed_ fingers sink into the metal of the lockers like it's nothing more than butter, because Keith's mind is running a mile a minute and he's just opened a locker that has a clean set of scrubs folded neatly in it, which is perfect.

He makes the mistake of looking into the flat panels of metal as he grabs the clothing; his reflection in the glossy metal of the lockers shows that there are also two large horns protruding out of his forehead, and Keith smashes a fist into the surface to dispel the vision.

Is this some sort of cruel fucking prank? Was he experimented on in this place?

The possibilities are endless, and he doesn't even care how his _wings_ bunch uncomfortably under the fabric of the shirt as he yanks it over his head. He manages to stuff his fucking tail — Christ, what is even happening — into the pants, and barely even cares that he's barefoot as he slams open the door and races through the thankfully empty hall until he finds a door marked as an emergency exit.

Not even the fresh outside air as he bursts through the door is enough to calm him, although he does take several gulps to try and steady himself enough to see if he can locate where he's at. Fortunately, the morgue is in a recognizable part of town, and Keith immediately orients himself before keeping his head down and praying that nobody will stop him and comment on the fucking extremities on his body. (Hell, _he_ doesn’t even want to comment on the fucking extremities on the body, but even thinking about them makes him feel sick, and he forces it down. Later. He can think about it _later._ )

By some sort of miracle, nobody even spares him a glance. He races through the streets as quickly as possible, and it isn't long before his feet feel cut up and aching from hitting the rough concrete so frequently, but the feeling of pain is almost a relief after recent events. It reminds him that he's still human — or, at least, maybe some part of him is. He hopes.

As he rounds the corner and sees his familiar apartment complex, he's struck with the realization that he has none of his personal possessions on him. Which, fuck. He definitely doesn't have any keys to get into his own place, and that’s going to pose a problem.

Keith looks around, but by another stroke of luck nobody else seems to be around. He tears down the _For Lease_ sign taped to his front door, scowling at it uncomprehendingly. It takes a moment to process, but then he remembers how easily the lockers had given underneath his hands, and he makes his way to the window that peeks into his small kitchen.

The glass shatters easily upon impact, and Keith will worry about picking the glass out of his hand later — right now, he’s more focused on getting inside. Crawling through the window isn’t difficult at all, and it isn't until he's safe within his home — which is, apparently, a dead man's apartment, now — that he finally _stops,_ falling to his knees and giving in to the urge to hyperventilate.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And Matt loves the magic. But the thing is — the thing is that, while he loves magic and how it has shaped his entire existence, the old adages about playing with fire hold a lot of truth, and now he's recovering from the burns that scorch across his very soul.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bron is really incredible at art (AS ALWAYS) and drew [this amazing picture](https://twitter.com/sootttea/status/820067990527877121) of Shiro beating Lance up that you all need to see. Other than that, we're terribly sorry that this took so long to get out and hope that the longer chapter makes up for it! We had a lot of fun with this particular POV and hope it clears some things up. ;)

Matt's analytical. He likes concrete truths, likes how neatly the pieces all fall together, likes the certainty that comes with the way most mathematical equations only have two answers: right or wrong. Certainties are comforting in their absolute credence, and science is one of the only things he’s ever seen as flawless.

The discovery of magic had upset his love for science for a very, very brief period in his time, but the pursuit for knowledge is eternal, and Matt’s always been resilient. He figured it out, managed to draw enough connections to forgive the disruption and carry on.

And Matt loves the magic. But the thing is — the thing is that, while he loves magic and how it has shaped his entire existence, the old adages about playing with fire hold a lot of truth, and now he's recovering from the burns that scorch across his very soul.

He knows exactly what’s caused him to act this way: paranoid, flinching at every loud noise, perpetually nervous. It's not a pretty path, what brought him here, but he's fought tooth and nail to live, and that's what really matters.

 

* * *

 

It starts, as many things do, with an angry woman.

Matt can't be any older than eight, but already he's immersed himself in texts that should be far beyond his comprehension. Studying science has opened up infinite passages of information, and he's constantly parched, constantly reaching into the fountain of knowledge to abate the dehydration. The laws of nature seem so vast and absolute, rife with knowledge that he eagerly soaks up with grubby hands and a determined glint in his eyes, obscured by the lenses of his glasses.

He's lounging on the living room couch, nose deep in a physics textbook his father had picked up from a nearby college bookstore, when the angry woman barges in through the front door. It's like the house shivers unhappily as she passes through the doorway, but — their home has always been a little bit odd, and he shrugs it off. ("Old walls," his mother had told him when he was still too young to rationalize the fact that monsters didn't live in his closet or under his bed. "When the wind passes through, it rattles the foundations. Nothing to worry about, love, I promise.")

The angry woman is a client of his parents, who run a business that has something to do with private medication and homeopathic remedies. Matt's not entirely sure he believes this, because he hasn't seen many medical supplies around the house, but then again, there's a reason there are several locks placed too high for him to reach on the door that leads into the basement, and he assumes his parents have told him to stay away from the room because it's where they conduct most of their work. And, since disobeying his parents means they'll take away his books, he doesn’t pay it any mind. Physics is more interesting than biology, anyway.

She stalks into the living room, bypassing him completely to wrench open the door to the basement, and if Matt wasn’t paying attention before, he certainly is now. He’s not dying to snoop around his parents’ workspace, but neither is he about to pass up the opportunity when it’s been so nicely presented to him. Both of his parents are downstairs, and if they’re busy dealing with the customer service aspect of the job, maybe they won’t notice Matt peeking down into the basement and taking stock of exactly what supplies reside down there.

“—and you never delivered the shipment, Holt, there’ll be hell to pay for this—“ the woman’s saying. Well. Her words are guttural and sound almost like a growl, and something in Matt’s hindbrain is whispering at him to flee, but he manages to push it aside in order to survey the basement. There are countless glass containers lining the walls, but he’s too far away to read exactly what’s scribbled on their labels.

“You know wolfsbane is hard for humans to harvest. We can only gather so much on a limited time basis,” his mother responds. Her voice is hard in the way it gets when Matt gets caught staying up far too late reading and has to wake up early the next morning, but there’s also something more... quietly panicked to it than he’s used to.

“I don’t give a shit about whether or not you get poisoned in the process, I’m paying you to do a job. Should I remind you of how unpleasant I can get when you haven’t brewed my potions?” She’s facing away from the stairs, away from Matt, but even from behind he can tell the way she’s posturing is vaguely threatening. Should he intervene? But what could he do, besides throw a stupid textbook at her —

“Do _not_ threaten my wife,” his dad says. Matt’s eyes, previously glancing over some of the strange liquids and substances in bottles on the walls, jerk toward his father. He sounds furious.

“Or what?” the woman sneers, and then a shiver wracks her entire body and her flesh — shifts. There’s no other word for it, and Matt has his glasses on, he’s not mistaking what’s happening for faulty vision —

Matt can’t help but gasp as her shivers turn into something _more,_ and dark fur emerges from beneath her skin to cover the pale flesh. It’s almost like the fur sprouts out of her pores. There’s the grotesque noise of bones breaking before it’s not only her skin that’s shifting but also her entire _body,_ and then both of his parents are cursing and scrambling around the basement. He has no idea why, no idea what the bottle of silvery pigment his father grabs could do to stop this — this _monster,_ but his movements are confident as he uncorks the bottle.

The woman’s fully transformed, now, her nose extending into an animalistic snout as she hunches over on all fours, and there’s another loud growl before she turns to lunge at Matt’s mom. His father’s shouting words that sound similar to the Latin names of some species he’d read about in some biology books, and then he sprinkles a significant amount of powder from the bottle into his hands before throwing it aggressively toward the woman-beast.

A pained howl fills the air, and Matt barely manages to scurry up and away from the doorway as she  turns and sprints up the stairs just behind him. He flattens himself up against the wall, eyes wide, as the creature — she looks like some kind of overlarge dog, rabid and enraged —

Time slows, even as he hears his mother gasp his name, because his eyes lock with the animal’s, and her — its mouth drops open in a cruel parody of a grin. He wonders if this is what death feels like, but the thought barely comes to fruition within his mind before the quick thudding of footsteps on the stairs reaches his ears and his dad scoops him up and off the ground, arms wrapped protectively around him, and Matt’s torn between hiding his face in his father’s chest and watching what his mom does. Curiosity wins out, now that he’s safely ensconced in his dad’s arms, as he watches her throw a vial of some sort of liquid at the monster. The glass of it shatters upon impacting the ground, but the liquid seems to evaporate immediately — which, even to Matt’s panic-riddled mind, shouldn’t obey the laws of physics — as the woman howls again, loudly.

She doesn’t attack, though. It seems whatever his mom’s done has worked, because she’s frozen in her tracks, eyes moving rapidly between them as her feet stay planted on the floor. The threat has been detained, it looks like, because the woman-wolf is rigid and immobile, and he’s protected by the cage of his father’s arms as he watches his mom drag her across the living room and onto their front porch.

His mom steps forward and tugs a handful of fur off of the immobile monster-woman. “We’ll be removing you from our wards,” she says disgustedly. “But we wish you the best of luck in finding a new supplier without any notice.”

He’s not entirely sure what that means, but it isn’t the most radical thing he’s seen or heard tonight. The door slams shut, and something immaterial settles over Matt’s shoulders. It makes him think of home, of _safety._ To be completely honest, Matt isn’t sure what’s more confounding: the fact that women can apparently transform into wolf-beasts, or the fact that his parents seem completely unfazed by the fact that such a thing is possible. He opens his mouth to ask about it, but no sound comes out. His base instincts have forced his vocal chords still, but his dad still seems to pick up on what he’s trying to say.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he starts, and his hands are still covered in silver dust. He releases Matt before wiping them on his pants as though it’s nothing more than dirt, although Matt knows that isn’t true because he watched it burn that woman’s fur and skin the moment it had touched her.

His mom hisses something under her breath that sounds like, _almost eight damn years, Sam_ , before both of his parents turn to him with strained smiles on their faces and a lot to explain. Instead of getting a talk about the birds and bees, like Matt’s heard of kids around his age getting, he gets a talk about werewolves and the magic that permeates the world around him.

Once the adrenaline fades and his body realizes he isn’t in imminent danger, it turns into one of the most exciting days of his life.

(When Katie's born, they don't even try to hide the magic from her. She's a natural, just like her brother was, and it would be a waste of their bloodline to keep her away from the alchemy that fairly sings to her like a way-less-deadly siren.)

 

* * *

 

Life changes after that, but it's for the better.

What Matt’s learned about science seems irreconcilable with magic, at first,  but it doesn't take long before Matt figures it out: the laws of physics and motion and thermodynamics don't stop existing just because magic does, and the intrinsic laws of magic provide a balance with science in a way that just makes _sense._ If anything, the two complement each other, strengthening and building upon one another to create the world they live in.

Matt discovers that his parents run an apothecary, of sorts. They harvest ingredients and craft enchantments and charms to distribute to the paranormals that live in their area. It’s apparently a profitable business, providing magical creatures with concealments and other sorceries to help them blend in with the humans.

His father trains him in the harvesting and preparing of enchantments and spells, and Matt quickly learns that magic and science are inseparably similar: mixing ingredients is just as scientific as a chemistry experiment is, and measurements must be incredibly precise if spells are to function as intended.

It uncovers an entire world that Matt never knew existed. He learns that the paranormal run rampant about the world alongside the reality of most mortals. The worlds are not separate but intertwined, and the deep magics that lay within the earth fuel the spirits and souls of those who walk it, unbeknownst to the majority of them. He thirsts for knowledge about the paranormal, about the magic that fuels them, and it’s fortunate there’s a huge selection of texts his parents keep in the basement to drink up.

Katie’s birth intrigues Matt. She’s so tiny, so fragile, and yet there is a strength to her that Matt knows she will grow into. He’s fairly confident that her soul would have eventually led her to the world of magic even if she hadn’t been born into a family of mages, her presence is so powerful.

Time passes, and both Matt and Katie prove themselves to be competent apprentices and then fully-fledged mages. His dreams of becoming an astronaut fall away as he carves runes into woods and metals. Crafting charms and creating personalized enchantments for all sorts of paranormals that step into their house is fulfilling, Matt thinks. He certainly isn't bored.

 

* * *

 

The thin strap of leather around his wrist, with a nondescript stone embedded in the center, is glowing white.

It’s never glowed white before.

Red is obvious enough: demons are commonplace. A dime a dozen. Most of them are lesser demons, not even worth the goosebumps that instinctively crawl over your skin at the sight of them. Black’s more threatening, because devils are dangerous, but they’re scarce enough that they aren’t too much of a concern. Besides, they’re only ever interested in humans when they’re using them for sacrifices or something as equally gruesome, and Matt tends to stay away from anything that looks even remotely like a dark magic ritual.

The light blue glow of fae is one that Matt sees often — it lights up whenever he’s anywhere near Allura, and has grown to be a comfort. Fae treat his family the kindest: the Holt lineage may not have any dryad blood remaining in it through centuries of breeding with humans, but the Fae remember their own.

Various shades of yellows, pinks, and greens decode some of the lesser paranormals, and more rarer shades like gold and silver indicate species that are great for harvesting spell supplies from. Matt crafted the enchantment for himself, and it’s been a priceless accessory for both his family’s business and his own personal curiosities.

When the stone fills with a grey haze, though, Matt’s hackles raise. It doesn’t happen on too regular a basis, but there have been instances, and they always catch him off-guard. He’s never actually seen a reaper before, but he supposes that’s a good thing. If reapers become visible to humans, it typically means they’re about to kick the bucket, which — no, thank you. Matt’s perfectly fine never seeing one.

White, though…

The enchantment has a color designated for most species of paranormal (and it’s been years since Matt memorized exactly which hue correlated to which kind of being), but in all his years he’s never seen it light up such a pure color.

A sense of giddiness fills his veins at the prospect of figuring out just who is causing his detection charm to go off, and Matt sweeps his gaze around the coffee shop. It’s a mortal one, but local and delicious, and he frequents it whenever Katie’s experiments grow too loud or his parents are entertaining possible clients.

It’s the middle of the afternoon, too late for the lunch rush and too early for most people to be off work, so the shop isn’t too busy. There’s a pretty girl with long red hair resting in a plush armchair that sits in the back corner of the place, but Matt’s seen her around before and knows that, while she _is_ a paranormal, she’s not likely to cause any trouble or make his charm flash anything but light green. She’s pretty far from the pond nearby where most of the city’s nymphs tend to live, but he can’t really blame her for wanting a quick coffee fix.

So, not her. Matt continues looking, but the rest of the cafe seems to be populated only by mortals.  Up at the counter, a tall guy with dark hair is conversing with the barista, and Matt’s eyes barely glance over him and onto the next target before he realizes that’s exactly what noticing an angel _would_ be like.

His dad’s ancient texts wax poetic about angels, but they also present a fairly common warning: divine beings rarely spend their time amongst mortals, and anyway humans don’t typically register the fact that they’re interacting with paranormals. It’s quite purposeful, in fact. Between glamours and charms, it’s nearly impossible for the average person to detect whether or not they’re interacting with something less than human, but — there _are_ outliers. More powerful beings tend to give off auras that affect the primal, instinctual part of a human’s brain that tells them to flee, but they are few and far between. Matt forces his eyes to stay on the guy ordering coffee, noting the way his mind flinches instinctively at the action.

What are the odds that angels are just caffeine addicts like the humans they lord their power over?

It’s an opportunity he won’t miss, and Matt snaps his book shut — an old tome about the lore surrounding leylines — and stuffs it into his bag. The guy’s still ordering coffee, and he makes his way across the shop to grab his attention before he can convince himself otherwise.

“Hey,” Matt says as the angel turns away from the barista, and he’s oddly out of breath considering the fact that he hasn’t done much but stride across the floor of a coffee shop. “I had no idea angels liked coffee.”

Too late, Matt realizes his mistake. He’s surrounded by magic so constantly that he often forgets that most paranormals see him as just another powerless mortal, which means one of two things: that this angel, whose brethren are not known for being particularly friendly to humans, is about to smite him where he stands for exposing what he is in a public place, or he’s interacted with enough humans that he’s able to shrug off accusations of being an ephemeral being and thinks that Matt’s words were a deliberate come-on.

And, judging by the bemused look the angel is currently shooting him, it’s the latter.

Fuck, Matt is an idiot. (And this guy is a great actor — seriously, he hadn’t so much as flinched at someone calling him out for what he really is, which means he’s probably familiar with hiding it as he interacts with mortals.)

“That—” Matt starts, meaning to say something like, _That came out wrong,_ because, well — Matt has _eyes,_ and this angel is quite possibly the most handsome creature he’s ever seen before, human or immortal, but he _did_ approach him with the scientific interest of a mage. He’s interrupted before he can actually force the words out, though.

“I’m not entirely convinced that coffee wasn’t created by a holy deity,” the angel says with a grin, and Matt’s pretty sure his heart has stopped dead in his chest at the sight of it. “So wouldn’t it make sense for angels to indulge?”

He forces aside his instinctual reaction to swoon — man, biological reactions can be a bit ridiculous sometimes — in order to see what’s really going on, here, because if Matt didn’t know any better, he’d say that the angel is… flirting back with him. Which is, naturally, not the case, so he squints behind his glasses to better get a handle on the situation. There’s a quirk to the angel’s lips that seems a bit self-deprecating, but he’s playing along with Matt’s words, and that means that… maybe Matt hasn’t quite screwed this up yet.

“I guess you’re onto something there,” he says, willing his inner researcher to come out, because this conversation is starting to feel like _flirting_ , and that’s way out of Matt’s league. Reeling it back into something more analytical and query-based is the only way he’s going to survive this encounter without running away as a flustered mess. “But, ah, I did mean it in a more literal way.”

The angel’s features go slack. “You,” he starts, mouth hanging slightly open in disbelief.

 _Well,_ Matt thinks wryly, _score one to me for startling a divine being into silence_. “I’m a mage,” he explains. It probably isn't the best idea he’s ever had to divulge personal information to a complete stranger, angel or not, but Matt’s kind of desperate to glean any data he can. (Katie would be proud of his boldness, really.) Angels are rare, and typically avoid interactions with mortals, so this guy is either a deviation from the norm or here for a reason, and he’s going to figure it out. “My name’s Matt. Have you ever heard of Dryad’s Tree Apothecary? It’s a family business.”

“I’m Shiro,” he says after a moment, eyes darting down to focus on the bracelet around Matt’s wrist, like he’s seeing the magic emanating from it for the first time. “Is there something I can help you with?”

Before, the angel — Shiro — had seemed amused and open, but his features have tightened and his focus is razor-sharp on Matt. He’s a bit quelled by the intensity of an angel at work directing his attention on him.

“I’m just curious.” He focuses on keeping his tone light. “I’ve never — most people like you tend to avoid people like me, so I figured I’d see if I could learn a little bit about you? It seemed like a good opportunity, and — I promise I’m not about to try to scam you into stealing a feather or something.” A nervous laugh pushes out of his lungs — was that too risky of a joke to say aloud?

"You're curious," he says, voice guarded. The barista behind the counter calls his name, and Shiro moves to pick up his drink.

Matt trails after him. "Yeah! You don't have to see me ever again if you don't want to, but part of working with magic as a mortal is getting to know as much about — your world as we possibly can.” He almost slips up, almost blurts out too much information about things most mortals should never know about. “I mean, you can decline to answer anything I’d ask, but I would really, _really_ appreciate it if you could give me any kind of details. Purely from a scientific standpoint, any new information would be beneficial—”

He knows he's rambling, knows he's probably two seconds away from Shiro using his grace to make him forget about this entire encounter, but he can't seem to stop. Surprisingly, Shiro shrugs a shoulder and moves over to an empty table.

"Sure," he says, and Matt can see a hint of the smile he'd seen before, so he can't be botching this too badly. "Ask away."

 

* * *

 

Shiro does not vanish into a glittery swirl of magic, never to be seen again as he pursues unknown angelic responsibilities. What Shiro _does_ do is worm his way into Matt's life, which is simultaneously the best and worst thing that could ever possibly happen to him.

He doesn’t make friends too easily. It’s not that he can’t keep a secret — he’s concealed his ties to magic from other humans for the majority of his life, but making friends with other mortals is severely lacking when he can’t reveal the paranormal aspects that he’s constantly surrounded by. Friendship seems almost meaningless when he’s forced to hide magic from them, and he hasn’t sought out human company in a long time outside of his family because of it.

It isn’t as though he’s completely lonely, though. Allura’s given all of the Holts free access to her club, and Hunk stops by often enough that Matt could consider him a comrade, but he’s still pretty severely lacking in the “friends with people the same species as him” category.

Befriending Shiro doesn’t really contribute to the problem, but as far as angels go, he’s _definitely_ an outlier. A friendly, hot outlier. (Matt’s also never really been attracted to any of his friends, before, and it’s basically torture.)

They still have their own jobs: Shiro will disappear for days on end to fulfill angelic duties and oversee the transportation of souls of the dearly departed, and it isn’t as though Matt doesn’t have his own responsibilities to tend to. But Shiro knows where Matt lives and spends the majority of his free time helping him harvest ingredients or accompanying him while he crafts charms. (Sometimes, Shiro even comes over for dinner with Matt’s family, which is — angels don’t need to eat, but then again, he’d met him in a coffee shop, so he’s chalked it up to a strange angelic quirk for human sustenance.)

The more he thinks about it, the more ridiculous it is. Divine beings are immortal, and the idea of them befriending someone who will die in what is essentially the blink of an eye seems almost laughable. And yet…

Shiro’s always there. He knows everything about Matt, knows how boring he can be to spend time with when he’s captivated by a new archaic magical text or a particularly challenging enchantment project, but he still stays. Knows that he prefers books to human interaction, and views the pursuit of knowledge as the primary reason for existence.

All of the mathematical calculations in the world still can’t account for why Shiro thinks Matt is worth even an ounce of his time, but Matt’s far too selfish (and far gone for the angel) to bring it up. He’s too smart to know that this could possibly go anywhere — the closest thing to it becoming a reality is what he dreams and fantasizes about.

What they have is okay. It’s enough, he tells himself.

 

* * *

 

It started out small. Looking back on it, Matt has no idea how he allowed things to spiral so far out of control, but he clings to the poor excuse: it started out small. Money was money, and it wasn’t like the charms he was crafting were too dangerous.

At first.

One of the first things his parents had taught him about their business was this: when you dabble in the fields of magic, know that there are three sides. Factions of light magic, factions of dark magic, and those who remain neutral.

“We tread the line down the middle,” his dad had told him once. “Our foremost priority is to conceal this world from normal humans. It means servicing all sides, and withholding personal opinions for the sake of humankind.” Dealing with the morally darker paranormals in their community isn’t necessarily a rare occurrence; even his mom and dad cater to the needs of dark magic users, as long as the tasks involved are oriented toward preventing the human community from realizing exactly who walks among them.

Matt’s propositioned by a group of demons in the middle of a delivery to a group of Fae commissioning him for protection wards. There are three of them, tall and with auras that seem a bit too strong for lower-tier demons, but they ask for concealment charms, and they’re basic enough demands that he agrees. Besides, if they’re on the higher spectrum of power, it’ll do them some good to have high-quality enchantments.

Except they come back to Matt, even after he’s issued them charms for standard rates. It’s another innocuous request, this time for a few defensive charms — demons don’t always get along with one another, and scuffles between warring factions aren’t unheard of — and he doesn’t see any reason to decline.

Four or five transactions pass between the lot of them — he reasons that the demons must be distributing Matt’s charms to others or something, with the volume they’re demanding of him, but they’re paying him well enough that it’s alright if they’re setting up a reselling ring or something — before they come with a new request.

“The defensive charms you’ve made us aren’t strong enough,” Prorok, the tallest of the group, tells him. He’s always seemed particularly supercilious, and it makes Matt frown. “We’ll need better ones.”

“I’ve given you the strongest we make,” Matt argues, although it isn’t technically true. He’s just hesitant to give too much firepower to demons, of all breeds, but if he can haggle a higher price for some more refined ingredients, then…

“Something with phoenix ash, I think,” Sendak says offhandedly, and Matt stills.

Phoenix ash isn’t a common — the legendary birds are incredibly rare, and their reincarnation cycles are even more infrequent.  These requests are starting to tread dangerous ground, and it makes him anxious. In an attempt to avoid conflict — he’s got a not-date for some coffee with Shiro in a few hours to get ready for — Matt agrees. His mind is far away the entire time he’s with Shiro at the cafe, analyzing their possible motives.

It takes a few days to come to the decision, but Matt’s not sure he can, in good faith, continue to accept commissions from the demons. He’s done more than enough for them already, anyway, and they’re edging closer to a line that isn’t one he wants to cross.

The sky opens into a torrential downpour on the day Matt tries to abandon the commission. He has some suspicion about what they’re trying to get him to craft, and it goes against everything he’s ever been taught. There are certain realms of magic in which humans and other mortals should never try to dabble in, and for good reason. Failure can be catastrophic, and success can be downright apocalyptic.

But Haxus grabs his arm as he spins to walk away after declaring that he’s not going to fetch their ingredients any longer, and his grip is tight enough to bruise.

“We’ve seen your sister around,” he starts, tone overly casual. “It would be a shame if something got the better of her while she was collecting some fur from a cat sidhe, hm?”

Matt’s stomach sinks like a rock, because not one day earlier had Katie bragged about tricking one of the mischievous beasts and came back with two fistfuls worth of fur. The next day, he steals phoenix ash from his parent’s locked and warded supply cabinet.

Things don’t improve. Matt harvests a few more ingredients, mostly for the sake of protecting Katie, but one day the demons arrange to meet with him and inform him, yet again, that his charms are too weak to service them well. One of them — he can’t remember which, too frazzled and caught up with the words spoken — suggests, offhandedly, that maybe he needs to collect something from an immortal being in order to strengthen his enchantments. Living forever is a pretty solid defense, after all.

It seals his fate, really.

Shiro’s starting to notice the way Matt has withdrawn from him, but there’s nothing to do about it. Matt times his business for the demons carefully so that Shiro’s always occupied with angelic duties, and he clings to the idea that if he can just finish up this charm, the demons will stop demanding him to craft things for them. It’s clear this was their true intention from the start, but Matt’s in too deep to do much but go along with it.

They joke about maiming his mother, or sacrificing his sister, on a frequent basis. He’s learned to tune it out.

Matt considers pilfering one of Shiro’s feathers, but even just the thought makes him sick. No, he can’t involve Shiro in this. He’ll have to find it some other way.  It takes a week of supply preparation before he’s ready. Matt ends up in a hospital and knows it’s a bad idea, but death clings to places like this, and if he can spot a reaper long enough to harvest even the tiniest scrap of a robe, or manage bottle a fraction of hazy aura, then he’ll be in the clear. He’ll be free of these demons.

He’s enchanted his glasses to grant vision for the ethereal beings, and has a bag full of supplies strapped onto his back. Specialized bottles with hand-carved runes to trap any sort of substance, and a carefully spelled knife to slice even the toughest — or most fragile — of ingredients.

Camping out in the hospital rooms of people likely to pass away from cancer or heart attacks isn’t a great way to pass the time, and the longer he remains with them, with the reminder that death is all-encompassing and will always, always win, the more antsy Matt gets. It’s cruel, to look at dying people and see them only as tools to help him harvest a fucking ingredient, but it’s better for them to die their pre-determined deaths than for Matt to be directly responsible for Katie’s or his mom’s death, and so he stays.

He convinces a nurse that he’s a sibling of a car crash patient with internal bleeding, and when the stranger’s vitals flatline on the monitors, Matt looks frantically around the room. For the longest time, there’s nothing, even as the doctors rush in and try to paddle the poor bastard back into the realm of the living, and it’s only the slightest haze of movement out of the corner of his eye that signals someone’s slipped into the room alongside the rest of the mortals. He checks his wrist, just once, and the dark swirl of grey on his enchantment’s stone solidifies that this is happening. The reaper’s intangible form seems to fill the room, and Matt’s relieved to note that his enchanted bottle will do the trick — he quickly uncorks it and steps toward the reaper as closely as he dares before capturing as much of the hazy darkness that crowds the hospital room.

Matt can never return to that hospital, not with the way he tore out of a recently dead woman’s hospital room and down the hallways to escape the possible rage of a reaper whose essence had been unceremoniously taken from him, but he’s done it. (And that’s what matters, he forces himself to believe.)

He doesn’t sleep for three days after harvesting the reaper’s aura. Matt’s done far too much research about things like divinity and the philosopher’s stone to feign ignorance on what the demons are really asking him to create. The worst part of it all is that a small part of him rises to the challenge: invincibility isn’t child’s play like concealment charms or warding enchantments are. It’s something that’s never been achieved before, and he’s privately thrilled to see if he can accomplish it.

But messing with a reaper of death, successfully harvesting an ingredient from one, doesn’t feel like the victory it should. It feels empty, like Matt’s officially crossed a line and done something he can never undo. The other supplies seem effortless to retrieve, after that.

The small part of academic curiosity and competitiveness dissolves into nothing the longer he works on crafting the charm. He prepares the wormwood, ash of birch, and mint with reckless abandon — poisonous properties of ingredients don’t faze him too much, after what he’s done.

When Matt engraves the last few runes into fir wood and and casts the correct spells over the ingredients, the charm manifests as a necklace. He can’t bear to look at it, and hardly manages to clutch it in one hand while he holds a shaking hand up to his arm. One quiet fire spell later, which does absolutely no damage to Matt’s revealed skin, and he ends up on his knees, retching stomach bile.

 

* * *

 

The demons are waiting for him at their chosen meeting location — an abandoned building far away from most of the known magic-dwelling locations of shops in the center of the city. It’s cliche to meet somewhere like this in order to complete a shady business deal, but Matt’s too worn-out and disgusted with himself to find it darkly humorous.

“I’m done,” he says, hoping they don’t pick up on the waver in his voice. His convictions are strong, but he’s run himself ragged the past few days completing the charm while obscuring his work from his family. He hands over the bag he’s been keeping the charm in, relieved when one of the demons grabs it a bit too eagerly. It’s out of his hands, and he doesn’t know what despicable things they’re going to do with such forbidden magic, but if he forces himself to forget about it, Matt can almost pretend he had no part in this.

“It’s real,” Haxus confirms after withdrawing the necklace and dragging a too-sharp nail across his skin. The flesh remains unpunctured, and Matt’s shoulders sag with relief. Finally, this hell is over and he can return to normal life —

“Can’t thank you enough, Matthew,” Sendak says. He holds out a hand, like he expects Matt to _shake_ it in some cruel parody of a _job well-done,_ but then it darts to his side and he withdraws a sharp, nasty-looking dagger with unexpected dexterity. It’s enchanted, if the purple glow around it means anything, and the realization hits him.

They have no intention of letting Matt live.

A protest freezes in his throat, because the look of conviction on Sendak’s features cements the fact that he’s not going to be able to talk himself out of this. The demons have what they want, and he’s no longer of any use to them. Disposable.

Matt backs up instinctively, but they’ve got him cornered. There’s nowhere to run, and he doesn’t have anything but basic charms on him for defense. As Sendak lunges toward him, his last thought is that he probably deserves this, but at least his family will be safe —

Except death doesn’t come.

One moment, he’s looking at the cruel glint of Sendak’s eyes as he leans forward to drive the dagger deep into Matt’s gut, and the next he blinks, and when he opens his eyes, all Matt can see is the broad expanse of Shiro’s back.

“What’s going on here?” Shiro asks, and his voice is deadly calm in a way Matt’s never heard before. He’s grabbed the blade of the weapon with a fist, stilled in its path mere inches from being embedded into Matt’s flesh. He breathes out a thready whimper.

Shiro positively should _not_ be here, but Matt’s never been more thankful for the fact that he is.

“I screwed up,” Matt says, refusing to take his eyes off the demons surrounding them. They seem to realize exactly who — or what, really — they’re dealing with, because Sendak attempts to retreat. He’s still got a tight grip on the dagger, though, and Shiro yanks him forward until he’s stumbling forward.

“I’m aware,” Shiro says through gritted teeth. Which means — he _knew?_ “We’re going to have a long talk about this.” He’s barely spoken before one of the demons tries to bolt; he turns his attention toward them, and although angelic grace isn’t a visible form of magic, its energy is palpable as he strikes them down. Matt’s eyes are wide behind his glasses, and his legs finally give out as he collapses to the ground and watches the carnage unfold.

Shiro’s beautiful in a lethal way as he grapples with the demons, and the other two attempt to scramble away from the crackling presence of his grace. The sheer display of power subdues Matt entirely — he can do nothing but watch as Shiro bounds toward the two of them as they flee. One has the enchanted necklace clenched in their fingers, and Matt tries to call out to let Shiro know he absolutely _cannot_ get away, but then an agonized scream fills the air, and suddenly Shiro’s not pursuing the demons any more because he’s convulsing on the floor in anguish.

It hardly registers that two demons have escaped with the invulnerability charm — Matt’s far too distracted by the way Shiro’s wings jut out of his shoulders, too stiff and rigid to be anything but the result of sheer _pain._ Before his eyes, one wing seems to catch on fire, leaving a terrible path of charred feathers and singed skin as it consumes him.

He doesn’t even remember how he gets home. All he can recall is the too-heavy weight of Shiro slumping against him, the adrenaline in his veins like a drug forcing him to keep moving closer and closer to his house, and the unmistakable scent of burned flesh.

Matt’s analytical. It’s something he’s prided himself on — the ability to read a situation, to predict all plausible outcomes based on visible evidence —but he never saw this coming. He has no way to understand why a divine being like an angel would ever step in front of a single mortal and protect him.

Nothing makes sense, and his thoughts fail to progress past the fact that he should be dead but instead, Shiro’s the one who seems to be dying.

 

* * *

 

The fact that Katie’s brought home a reaper does nothing to quell his paranoia. He doesn’t want to forgive her for it, but — she also doesn’t _know,_ has no idea what he’s gone through, and he’s not about to put her at risk by telling her.

Still, it’s impossible to rid his mind of the fact that he’s supposed to be dead, and having not just one, but two, immortals living under his roof when he’s created a charm meant to mimic their transcendent abilities it a perpetual source of anxiety.

None of them can ever know.

He’s positive there’s some sort of unique punishment for mortals who mess with immortality. Black magic itself is inherently dark, but it still obeys the laws of the world. The necklace Matt crafted, though, is a loophole, feeding off the energy emanating from reapers, and it’s dangerous. Darker even than blood magic, and instead of being punished like he should be, his closest friend has sacrificed himself for Matt. He’s acutely aware of the fact that Shiro’s current state is his direct responsibility, and the guilt gnaws at him constantly.

Living is exhausting, and on the harder days Matt wonders why Shiro even protected him in the first place. Angels don’t just fall from grace for random humans, so why did Shiro? He’s contemplated the thought more times than he can count, but if there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear, it’s that even as the paranoia and guilt overwhelm him, he isn’t about to let Shiro’s actions go to waste.

So he wards his room. Places additional safety checks on the entire house. Carries defensive and offensive charms with him at all times, just in case the demons try to kill him again. But no matter what he does, it doesn’t feel like enough. He’s still a stupid, useless mortal with an unconscious angel who sacrificed himself for someone not worth saving.

Not leaving the house for long stretches of time without his family catching on is a difficult task to manage, and Matt forces himself to go out every few days to avoid suspicion. It’s grueling, to step outside of protective wards and into the world, where demons lurk around every corner and most likely have a hit on him, but the other option is to involve his family, and he got here trying to avoid exactly that. It’s the lesser of the two evils, but not by much.

He’s only out of the house for an hour — he’d monitored every minute ticking away on his phone — but it’s enough time for everything to go to hell.

Instinctively, Matt knows something is wrong the moment he crosses over the threshold. The majority of their wards are infused with Holt blood, providing a line of communication without words of what’s been triggered, as well as the status of magic and non-magic users in the direct vicinity. The wards in his room have gone off, which means — Shiro, or something to do with him. He hurries through the living room, turning to bolt down the hallway and into his room, when he hears the sounds of a struggle coming from outside. Their sliding glass door to the backyard is ajar, and Matt dips a hand in his pocket to clutch one of the charms he’d made — only a stunning enchantment to halt an enemy in their movements should they attack — as he moves closer to the doorway.

Outside, he sees the outline of Lance pressed into the ground. Shiro’s on top of him, in the midst of a furious assault, and although it’s dark, Matt can better see the damage of his wing now, drooping and burned and _ruined_ , and —

His mind blanks completely, and it’s all he can do to croak out Shiro’s name disbelievingly.

Somehow, it’s enough to halt his movements. It seems like everything stops, not just Shiro’s arm, but then everything bursts into action as Shiro closes the gap between them.

He knows it’s wrong, to ignore the way Lance is whimpering from Shiro’s actions. But Shiro’s awake, he _survived,_ and the wrongness of the wards being activated and the anxiety from being away from home, from safety, compound until all Matt can think about is his best friend, his angel.

(A wicked, cruel part of his mind whispers about how reapers probably deserve to feel an ounce of the fear he lives with, now, but it’s swallowed by guilt as he drags Shiro back inside the house, collapsing against him as relieved tears slide down his cheeks.)

But it’s a miserable feeling, to be so happy that Shiro survived, all the while knowing the reason he was even put into a situation like this because of Matt’s sins. Even Shiro’s consciousness doesn’t resolve everything Matt’s done, and he can feel himself spiraling down into the darkness, but maybe that’s to be expected. He’s committed a grave sin, after all, and every time he sees the darkened flesh of Shiro’s arm and the black, charred feathers of his wing, he wonders why they aren’t on his body instead, marring him forever for what he’s done.

 

* * *

 

The air around his house is tense, and not just because Matt's re-rigged the wards to respond like a hair trigger to any hint of offensive magic. He’s thankful that his parents are out on a week-long trip to go educate some mages in a remote city about maximizing the efficiency of enchantments, because he has no idea how they would react to finding out about Shiro attacking Lance.

Matt isn’t entirely sure how he feels about it, even now. There’s the festering shame for ignoring Lance, who obviously needed attention — Katie had told him, in a bitten-off, agitated kind of way what damage Shiro had inflicted upon Lance — but he can’t comprehend, even now, doing something like forsaking Shiro’s safety for that of a relative stranger.

Shiro saved his life, and if there’s one thing Matt can do in return, it’s honor that by dedicating himself to the angel. Shiro has been avoiding the house, though, and while Matt understands why, it also hurts. The outside world is too dangerous to seek Shiro out, and he’s not even sure how to confront the situation at this point.

He’s also overwhelmingly _tired._ It’s embarrassing, to acknowledge that he’s grown so weak he no longer feels safe sleeping alone, but he’d grown used to Shiro’s warmth in his bed while he’d been unconscious. Maybe it wasn’t a smart move, to keep him so close at all times, but it was a comfort in a time when comfort was bereft due to Matt’s self-exile, and it had made him feel — warm. Loved, even if it was just a phantom of such a thing.

With Shiro out of the house to give Lance space, Matt’s avoided his room almost as much as he’s avoided the outside world. Sleeping alone is worse than not sleeping at all.

One of the best — or worst, depending — things about the basement being their primary workspace is the lack of windows. Matt has no idea how long he’s been down there, but he knows instinctively that it’s been far too long since he’s last slept. His muscles feel weary with exhaustion, and his mind is a perpetual loop of self-doubt and despicable thoughts.

It’s been weighing on him that Shiro seems to recall everything, and Matt can’t handle it.

After he’d woken up, Shiro had checked Matt over to ensure his well-being, and hadn’t even spared a thought toward his own health. He’d shrugged off the lasting damage to the right side of his body, to his complete lack of grace, and Matt has no fucking idea how. He doesn’t ask him — doesn’t know if he _can_ ask him — why he did it, and his curiosity and guilt eat at him until he’s not sure there’s anything left.

Shiro’s too good, even now, and Matt wonders if the reason he’s distancing himself is because he’s trying to cut ties. Matt can’t blame him.

He has what Lance had told him memorized — that many angels never recover from falling, that they can’t cope with existence once they’ve been stripped of their grace. He has no idea what powers, if any, Shiro still retains. They haven’t spoken much beyond the first night when Shiro had woken up, and even if they did Matt’s not sure he’d know what to say. Keeping the necklace a secret is shameful, but he’s positive he couldn’t stand seeing the betrayal on Shiro’s face if he ever found out.

Maybe this is all part of Matt’s deserved punishment?

His head aches from the thoughts and the weariness of his body, and a semi-functioning part of his brain informs him it’s likely due to dehydration. He’ll have to brave the kitchen and hope that nobody’s around.

Of course he’d have no luck, though, because Lance is sitting at the kitchen table, staring down at a book about social etiquette and clearly doing a very poor job of actually reading it. His face still bears the evidence of Shiro’s assault: there’s a scab healing on his lip and dark bruises smattered across his features. Matt’s positive there are more bruises underneath his clothing.

He flinches imperceptibly when Matt steps into the kitchen, and it’s a cruel kind of irony that has Matt’s lips tugging into a smile as he moves to grab the water pitcher from the fridge. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Why would a reaper ever deign to _flinch_ around a mere mortal, whose lifeforce is nothing compared to the eternal existence of death’s handler?

Matt opens a cupboard and reaches for a clean glass, intent on ignoring the reaper sitting at his kitchen table. He’s never been too skilled at confrontation, and avoiding any kind of conversation is probably for the best.

It’s one thing to tell himself this, and another to actually go through with it, though, because the silence is stifling and whenever he closes his eyes all he can think about is the way Lance had flinched at seeing him. Matt’s had his fair share of feeling that way, too.

“I’m sorry,” Matt says into the silence, startling the both of them. Lance stares at him, and he has to avert his gaze from those piercing blue eyes in order to continue. “I shouldn’t have… left you there. Shiro was my first priority, and that isn’t going to change, but abandoning you was wrong.”

“My mind,” Lance starts, and it’s something Matt wasn’t expecting to hear. He’s intrigued with the logistics of it all, of course, but he also knows Lance is Katie’s project and anyway, he’s had his own problems to deal with that have nothing to do with cramming a reaper into a human body. “In my mind, I know I’m immortal. But this body is new to me and Pidge has crafted so many charms, and I’m not quite sure what they all do. I panicked, and your angel took advantage of my confusion. It felt like I was dying.”

He ignores the way his stomach turns when Lance says _your angel._ “He thought you’d killed me.”

Lance looks at him for a long, long time. Matt’s hypothesized about it for awhile, now, based on how things turned out, but his suspicions are confirmed as realization hits Lance’s features. “It wasn’t Pidge's soul that summoned me,” he says slowly. “It was yours.”

Matt’s glad Katie and Shiro aren’t around for this conversation. He doesn’t want her to have to hear this, and, while Shiro obviously knows what happened, his absence makes it a little easier to talk about. “We share the same blood.”

“Divine intervention, huh?” Inexplicably, a hesitant smile tugs on Lance’s lips.  “Only a few things that could mess with me like that. I can’t imagine what you did to gain an angel’s affection, but I would _not_ want to have to brawl against angry grace for a single soul.”

It’s a self-deprecating joke, one that reminds Matt of what happened in their backyard just a few days prior, but there doesn’t seem to be any animosity in Lance’s voice, only wryness and a sense of understanding. “I’ll tell you when I figure it out,” he says, extending the olive branch. “I’m… glad it allowed you to meet Katie, though. You’re important to her.”

Guilt still twists in Matt’s gut — guilt for not feeling as apologetic as he should after seeing Shiro pummel a reaper into submission, guilt that his closest friend has been ostracized and stripped of his grace. Guilt that _he’s_ still here when he deserves death for what he’s done. But Lance is unattached to what Matt’s been through, and it isn’t fair to treat him as though he’s heavily entwined with those who hurt him.

The way Lance’s face shifts tells Matt it was the right thing to say. His eyes soften at the mention of his sister’s name, and his voice is quiet with emotion. “She means a lot to me. Your entire family does,” he says. “Still trying to come to terms with sharing a roof with the angel who beat the crap out of me, but you can’t win ‘em all, right?”

Lance laughs, but it makes Matt frown. “Shiro’s…I know he hasn’t been around the past few days. Part of it _is_ that he’s avoiding you to give you some space, but he feels awful about what he did to you. I don’t know what to offer a reaper as an apology, but I’m certain he’s trying to come up with something.” It’s more than he’s said in the past few days combined, but it’s the truth. Shiro’s going to fix this — Matt isn’t sure if it’s an angel trait or just a Shiro trait, but the man is dedicated to fixing things he feels he’s responsible for. (And if he’s done nothing to address the fact that he lost his status as a divine being to save Matt’s life, well. Matt deserves the silent treatment.)

“Just a joke, Matt,” he says, presumably because Matt’s frowning something awful, but he hasn’t forgotten the way he’d flinched the moment Matt had walked into the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Matt says. “If you need any of your charms refreshed, let me know, okay?”

Lance shoots him a smile. “Will do, thanks. I think I get it, now.” Matt knows he isn’t just talking about magic.

Thing between them still aren’t perfect — the bruises high on Lance’s cheekbones are a reminder of that — but it’s a start.

 

* * *

 

His appetite hasn’t quite returned yet, but Matt chokes down half a granola bar before returning to his work.

It’s easier to busy himself with menial work, and Katie shoots him a confounded look when he offers to go into the nearby forest to restock herbs and wood. In the past, they’ve held a vast array of competitions to determine who would have to harvest common ingredients, and Matt’s willingness has certainly garnered an odd response. But — it feels like everyone’s always staring at him, anyway, waiting for him to slip up so they can attack, that Katie’s looks are easy to shrug off in comparison.

Harder tasks remind him of the impossible, of stealing from the dealers of death and the fine tremble of his hands that comes along with crafting eternal life, but this — this is mindless. Easy. He could do it in his sleep. (Which may or may not actually happen, given the fact that he hasn’t slept in days and is in constant danger of passing out against the cold surface of their work table.)

Even an apprentice mage could enchant such basic supplies. Katie was trailing after unicorns to harvest mane hair before she could even comprehend the reason why the gentle creatures allowed her so close, but there’s something cathartic about focusing on the simple ingredients for extended periods of time. It gives his mind something to focus on.

Matt starts when his phone trills sharply, but the sound registers after a heartbeat as his recognizable ringtone — the opening theme from a videogame he’d played with Katie a lifetime ago.

“Hey, I need your help,” Shiro says into his own phone, a brand new thing picked up by Matt a few days prior, after he’d discovered he had lost enough grace that he couldn’t conjure enough magic to transport himself at ease. His words are rushed, and he’s talking again before Matt can do much but utter a standard greeting. “I know you’re busy, but I just found a half-demon wandering the streets and we need you to bring some concealment charms to the coffee shop we met at as quickly as you can.”

Matt recoils as soon as he hears the word _demon_ , but he forces his mind to comprehend the rest of the words. A moment of uncomfortable quiet passes, and he clears his throat to make it function well enough to manage some kind of response.

“Yeah,” he says. After all that’s happened, he’s not exactly willing to go out of his way to help a demon — even if they aren’t affiliated with the Galra, but for Shiro, whose heart is too big for his own good, he’ll do anything. “Yeah. I’m on my way.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The guy continues like Keith hadn’t said a word. “It’s — it’s broad daylight, and you’re walking around like _that?_ Are you a complete idiot?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends! Sorry this took awhile to get out, real life accosted us and we're only just recovering from it, haha.
> 
> We've gotten some _amazing_ fanart for this AU and it would be a sin not to share it! Thank you so much to Sugoi monster for [this amazing Keith/Lance picture](http://sugoimonster.tumblr.com/post/157382750779/made-this-for-soottea-it-was-their-bday-a-few). And so much gratitude to Val for drawing [these spicy boys](https://twitter.com/sinnieminni/status/809662721188855808)!

Keith frowns down at himself. It doesn’t make any sense — a dark shirt drapes over his shoulders like it belongs there, thin and well-fitted, but seeing it on himself does nothing but raise his hackles and make him want to yank it off as quickly as possible.

This is his favorite shirt. It’s far too well-worn to be shown in public: the hem is frayed with overuse, the collar stretched out from one too many nights tossing and turning in bed, pulling the fabric along with his body’s shifting movements in sleep. It hasn’t exactly stopped Keith before, and he’s worn it outside on many occasions simply because it’s a convenient article of clothing, except...

With two tentative fingers, he plucks at the soft fabric with disdain. It feels disgusting to have it draped loosely over his frame, which Keith _knows_ is illogical because he’s worn it for days on end in the past and never had a single problem with it.

Right now, though, it makes his skin crawl.

He can’t really explain it, other than that the shirt seems so disgraceful and _ugly_ that it would feel wrong to wear it in any context where others could see him in it.

“Fine,” he bites out under his breath, even though there’s nobody around to hear it. It feels like he’s arguing with himself as he tugs the shirt over his head and tosses it haphazardly into a pile of other rejected clothing options. His stomach growls loudly, and it’s an irritating reminder of the fact that he’s been staring at the contents of his closet for the past 45 minutes and no closer to getting dressed than he was when he rolled out of bed.

Fuck.

He has to wear _something,_ especially if he wants to continue concealing the fact that he now possesses some very un-humanlike appendages. But for some reason, none of the clothes in his room seems bearable enough to wear out, and the idea of others seeing him in any of the sorry excuses of clothing strewn about his bedroom is positively repulsive.

It’s a small blessing that he even has access to his clothing, really, especially when everyone believes him to be dead. A quick call to his landlord had afforded him an extra month to move his essentials to a new location — pretending to be a relative coming to collect his deceased cousin’s belongings had been a plan thought up on the fly, but effective enough.

Having a few extra weeks to find a new place to live — preferably in some part of the city that won’t recognize him as a dead man — isn’t helping him at all currently, though. How can he have a huge closet of clothing and nothing to wear?

Frustrated, and hungry, Keith finally gropes for a nondescript, dark long-sleeved shirt and stomps toward his small kitchen area. It’s a miracle that the jeans hugging his hips were apparently deemed worthy by his suddenly very picky subconscious, and a few snips of the scissors from his knife block later, he pulls back with a triumphant smirk.

He slips on the now crop-top and grabs his keys. A backpack over his shoulder to conceal the bumps of his wings underneath his shirt and a hat to hide his horns, and Keith’s out the door.

It’s not exactly satisfactory, but it’ll do. At least, it will until he can do some shopping.

 

* * *

 

With no bike to get around, Keith’s limited to places that are within walking distance. It wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that he’s supposed to be dead, and running into anyone who knows such a thing is a constant worry at the back of his mind, but there isn’t much to do about it until he can get out of the local area.

He still needs to get his gloved hands on enough money to move into a new place, which is one of his top priorities, but his bank account’s already cleared out. Withdrawing savings from his bank account a few days after his supposed death wasn’t too hard — his bank hadn’t frozen his account yet, and if they happened to realize he’d made a withdrawal past his expiration date, then it could easily be chalked up to credit card theft or something.

Honestly, though, Keith prefers to keep most of his money (the majority of it winnings from races) as cash, and he’s been whittling away at the stash of it since his untimely death. That’s obviously not an option for getting some quick cash, now, and he’s not desperate, yet, but...

There seems to be one major positive to the fact that he has wings and a tail: along with the bizarre aesthetic change, something about the way he speaks has people bending over backwards to appease him.

It’s something he noticed on accident. There’s no such thing as too much money, and Keith isn’t opposed to roughing a few people up in order to acquire it — it’s nowhere near as satisfying as kicking their asses on the track, but without a bike and a new identity, that’s not a possibility just quite yet.

And fuck, he misses Red. It’s one of his motivations for grabbing his pocket knife and flipping the hood of his jacket up to cover his features as well as his horns. Shoving the first businessman-looking guy he finds into an alley when the cover of night has fallen and accosting him at knifepoint probably isn’t going to earn him any favors if there’s some kind of divine being deciding on his fate, but hell. Keith isn’t a saint, hadn’t been one even before he’d grown strangely demonic appendages. Mugging a few people isn't the end of the world — he has no intention of doing something like _killing_ them, anyway.

To his complete surprise, the first man he’d robbed, who had spent the first few moments recoiling in fear and submission, had relaxed entirely the moment Keith growled at him to cough up his wallet. He’d slipped a hand into his pocket to retrieve the thick leather accessory, and had even _smiled_ as he’d offered it up as though eager to comply with Keith’s demands.

 _This,_ Keith had thought at the time, grabbing the wallet and testing the man’s willingness with a barked command for him to kneel. He’d acquiesced immediately, dropping to his knees so quickly Keith was sure it would leave bruises. _This is something I can work with._

 

* * *

 

It’s become something of a game, honestly.

Keith won’t pretend to understand it at all, but in a world where he can wake up after dying and turn into some sort of monster, the idea of having some bizarre power that allows him to steal from unwitting others isn’t really all that farfetched. It’s almost fun, really, to see the extent to which people will do anything to please him.

The store’s expensive: that much is immediately clear. The price tags hanging off of each article of clothing for sale would typically be _way_ out of Keith’s price range, even after a good night of racing, but that’s the point. It wouldn’t be a game without some sort of risk, and Keith’s eager to see just how far he can push this strange ability.

There’s a shrewd-looking woman behind the counter that looks up as he walks in, but he’ll worry about her later. His target right now has to be someone that looks like they have every intent of purchasing clothing from the store — the giggling teenage girls that dramatically place too-expensive dresses up to their frames are undoubtedly just shopping for the sake of it, and anyway, Keith doubts they’d have the money to satisfy him for even a second.

Keith moves with purpose through the racks of clothes, eyes scanning for the right person.

He finds his ideal target perusing through a rack of button-down shirts. The man’s appearance doesn’t seem to give away much: he’s in slim, dark jeans and has tousled red hair, looking for all the world like an average shopper, but he’s got a few articles of clothing draped over his arm already, and a quick check at a rack nearby tells Keith that they’re definitely some of the more pricy articles.

_Perfect._

“Hey,” Keith says to grab his attention, and the redhead turns to face him.

“Oh, I’m afraid I don’t need any help,” the man says, nicely enough. He clearly thinks Keith is an employee, or something, and Keith doesn’t bother to correct him.

“Of course,” he says, undeterred. “But I think you’ll be able to help me out, won’t you?”

“Uh,” he responds intelligently. He looks surprised at Keith’s forwardness, but not unreceptive. That’s good — if Keith can make it look like they’re flirting, then the people around them won’t be suspicious when he sidles up to the guy and ruthlessly uses him.

“I don’t have much to wear.” One of the things about his new power that Keith has noticed is the fact that he needs to directly ask others to do something for him — once he has their consent, however unwilling it would truly be, they seem to lack the ability to refuse. “You’d love to help me buy some new clothing, right?”

The redhead turns to putty in his hands. Keith _probably_ overdoes it as he ransacks the store, taking care to purchase several coats that fit snugly around his chest, as well as various fashionable shirts and jeans that slide over his hips like they were made for him. On impulse, he grabs a few pairs of boots and comes across a gorgeous pair of high heels that happen to be his size, and he hooks his fingers around the heel of them as he passes by.

The real kicker is when they approach the severe-looking woman manning the cash register. Keith has an arm looped casually through the guy’s, his other arm full of potential purchases, and he remembers the way she’d looked at him as he’d walked in the store, like she knew he was up to no good. Probably too observant for her own good, but he’s positive it won’t take too much persuasion for her to forget about what she’s seen.

“You’ll give us a discount, won’t you?” he purrs, confident now. Her expression melts into one of concession, and Keith can’t help but grin sharply as she rings them up and then halves the total. It’s more about the fact that he can control her like this than the fact that he’s lessening the financial burden of the compliant man he’s currently taking advantage of. His “date” pays, of course, swiping a silver credit card and signing for the purchase like he had every intention of doing so the moment he’d walked into the shop.

Keith leaves the store with both hands full of bags containing hundreds of dollars worth of designer clothing and a contented purr of success in the back of his mind.

 

* * *

 

“Oh, god, I’m sorry!”

“It’s no problem,” he assures the woman who just shoulder-checked him. Keith shoots her a smile, too, just for good measure, and the woman looks so apologetic he _almost_ feels bad.

They’ve run into each other on the street — well, more like Keith “accidentally” bumped into her as they crossed paths and used it as an excuse to chat her up without seeming too suspicious to the bustle of people around them on the sidewalk — and, judging by the expensive purse she’s toting and the newer-looking phone clenched in her well-manicured fingers, she’s the perfect prey. He hasn’t even bothered to conceal his horns or wings, today: nobody’s said anything about it, and he has an inkling that maybe they’re simply invisible to those around him.

This one’s an easy pick-up: Keith’s just hungry, and wants the woman to treat him to a nice meal at the fancy seafood restaurant down the street, but he’s interrupted before he gets the chance to truly convince her.

“What —" a choked voice says from behind him, and Keith spins on his heel to face whoever’s intercepting his easy meal.

“Mind your own business,” he snaps before turning back to the woman. It looks like the haze that Keith’s grown familiar with has enveloped her eyes, which is perfect. If he can get this guy off his tail, then he’s well on his way to a nice, expensive crab dinner.

“What are you doing?” the stranger asks, and Keith shifts instinctively, preparing for a battle. He’s not particularly in the mood to brawl with this guy, but he’s willing if that’s what it comes to.

“Fuck off, man. We’re going on a date.” He’s too agitated to even attempt to smooth over his coarse words with the woman still frozen in front of him, although it’s not like she’s in control of her faculties to even realize what’s happening, but something about the stranger makes him uncomfortable, and it has him on edge.

The guy continues like Keith hadn’t said a word. “It’s — it’s broad daylight, and you’re walking around like _that?_ Are you a complete idiot?”

“No,” Keith growls. “But you clearly are. Go. Away.”

Keith is pretty sure he hears the guy mutter something about _babies,_ but that doesn’t make any sense, and then he’s grabbing at Keith’s arm with a grip that feels excessively strong. He recoils, but to no avail: trying to yank his arm away is a fruitless effort with such an iron vice wrapped around his upper arm.

“Your magic stinks,” he says, and that’s enough to still Keith completely.  “My name’s Shiro. Come with me, we have to get you some charms before someone notices.” The man — Shiro — glances apologetically at the woman Keith was hoping to scam, and she blinks the haze away before turning and walking away as though she’d never bumped into Keith at all.

“You owe me lunch, asshole,” Keith says as she vanishes into the crowd. “Nobody’s noticed anything, anyway.”

“Probably because your magic is persuading everyone within a hundred feet to ignore the stupid antics you’re up to,” the man responds, and Keith sputters in disbelief. Who _is_ this guy? Or, more accurately, _what_ is he? There’s no way this strength is human, and he’s clearly privy to information about Keith that Keith himself isn’t aware of.

Shiro tugs a phone out of his pocket and scrolls through it before making a call. Keith can’t do much but follow along as he fairly drags him down the street.

“Hey, I need your help,” Shiro talks into the phone, stopping at the doors of a nearby building before pulling Keith into an innocuous-looking coffee shop. They move to an empty table, and he shoots a glare at Keith that clearly reads _Do not move,_ and Keith reluctantly complies with a scowl. He’s kind of curious, now, and isn’t about to bolt. This is the first person who’s confronted him about the fact that he’s not human, and Keith’s going to learn more before he bails.

“I know you’re busy, but I just found a half-demon wandering the streets and we need you to bring some concealment charms to the coffee shop we met at as quickly as you can.”

 _Half-demon?_ Keith’s interest is definitely piqued, now. He’d be lying if he said that he hadn’t considered the possibility of being a demon — his imagination had run the gamut of wondering if he was some kind of human experiment to the possibility of being an alien — but Shiro sounds confident in his identification, and it would explain a lot.

Speculation is one thing, but he’s bolstered by the idea that Shiro seems to know exactly what’s going on. He doesn’t realize Shiro’s talking to him until something is tossed to him. It’s a prewrapped sandwich, Keith identifies upon catching it mid-air. His reflexes certainly haven’t deteriorated since becoming a… half-demon, if Shiro’s correct.

“Lunch,” Shiro says cheekily before sitting down and unwrapping the plastic from his own sandwich. “My… friend is coming to help you out. How on earth have you functioned like this —” he punctuates _this_ with a wave of his hands at Keith’s overall appearance, which causes him to scowl “— for so long? You clearly have no self-preservation skills.”

Keith doesn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure until a few minutes ago that other people could even _see_ the horns atop his head and the wings that protrude from his shoulderblades.

They eat in silence, and Keith chews on his food with disdain. It certainly isn’t the expensive meal he was expecting, that he’s grown used to conning people into buying for him lately. The bread is bland on his tongue, but his thoughts quickly drift — his mind is brewing with endless questions. If he’s a demon, then what does that mean? If demons exist, what _else_ is out there? How had he never noticed such a thing? Is this guy some kind of supernatural creature, as well?

A harried-looking guy in glasses approaches them after an indeterminate period of time, and Keith watches Shiro’s face transform upon seeing him. He’d seemed somewhat amiable while interacting with Keith, but upon seeing the brunet that walks in, his features tighten and he plasters an obviously fake smile on his face.

The bespectacled man picks them out instantly, striding over to their table before shoving a handful of what looks like miscellaneous jewelry items at Keith. “Here,” he says shortly.

“Matt,” Shiro starts, but the man hisses, “Don’t tell him my _name,”_ and tension fills the air so quickly it’s almost palpable. Keith wonders why Matt even came if he was so unwilling, but the guy’s a virtual stranger and he can’t do something like ask about it.

“Really?” Shiro asks, looking down at the metal and wood items in Keith’s outstretched hand. “We have to take him to your house to craft him some more specialized charms. These are only what, concealment charms? He’s going to need something to mask his persuasion abilities, I caught him trying to swindle some poor girl on the streets.”

Charms? As in, magical charms? And what’s so bad about convincing a woman who should have been _overjoyed_ at going on a lunch date with him? He’s even wearing his nice clothes, well-tailored and clinging to his figure attractively.

“I don’t want to do this,” Matt mutters in a low voice, and the words are probably not meant for Keith to hear. He’s paying sharp attention to the two of them, though, because it’s clear they know much more about himself than he currently does.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Keith says, the words stunted and awkward as both Shiro and Matt turn to acknowledge him. He can see that Matt’s recitence is grounded in some sort of fear, and placating him seems to be his best option, right now. “I wouldn’t even know how.” It’s not the entire truth, but even he’s not stupid enough to do something like alienate the only people who have given him new information since he watched his own body burst into flames in a morgue a few weeks previous.

Matt’s shoulders stay tense with anxiety, but something in his eyes seems to relent at Keith’s words. “Tell me how your magic has manifested and I’ll see what I have prepared at home.”

Keith’s reluctant to tell him everything right off the bat, so he settles for a half-truth: “I woke up like this one day. Powers and everything.”

Matt looks at him in suspicion before sighing defeatedly. They vacate the coffee shop shortly thereafter, travelling down the street and into a residential area in silence. Keith trails slightly behind the two, who aren’t talking but look like they have a million things they _should_ say to one another.

Stopping at a fairly innocuous-looking house, Matt turns and catches Keith’s gaze with a sharp look. “Wait outside. You won’t be able to come in, anyway.”

“Is all of this really necessary?” Shiro asks. “He’s harmless — can’t you tell he’s basically a newborn? And I’m here in case anything happens. You know I’ll keep you safe.”

“You’re also inj—” Matt cuts himself off. He averts his gaze, staring hard at the door. “Yes. It is necessary.”

Keith narrows his eyes at the word _newborn,_ but ends up sitting on the concrete steps of the house's front porch as the two of them head inside. He’s uncomfortable doing so, and there’s a whisper of something across his skin that seems almost like it’s telling him to leave. It scratches like an annoying itch, causing him to shift uneasily. Is this the magic they’ve been talking about?

There's the suggestion of movement at the corner of his eye, but when he turns his head to catch it, all Keith sees is the swish of a window curtain falling back into place.

Matt finally emerges from the house after a while. The sun’s setting below the horizon, bathing Keith’s world in an orange-pink glow, and he pushes to his feet as Shiro crowds the entryway behind Matt. It seems a bit odd to be doing all of this on the house’s front doorstep, but Keith honestly doesn’t think he could step foot inside the house even if he wanted to.

"Just,” Matt starts, a furrow forming in his brow. "Just stand there. These are fresh components that will manifest into charms once they come in contact with your magic. You’ll keep them on whenever you interact with humans — they can’t know you’re a paranormal, alright? It would disrupt the balance of our world. They’ll always manifest as something that you can take off, though, for when you’re alone or in certain company.”

There’s a determination in his eyes that Keith hadn’t seen before: it’s a good look on him, like he’s distracted by the art of creating magic instead of preoccupied with whatever has him so eager to antagonize Shiro and Keith.

Keith does as Matt commands. He stands up straight as Matt fidgets with the contents cupped in his hands — there’s some kind of ashy dust and a few other components that Keith doesn’t immediately recognize. When he starts muttering, though, the ingredients seem to melt into one another, until there’s a glowing light that surrounds them.

Almost in the same instant that the light fades, Keith feels a sharp lance of pain cut through the flesh of his tongue. Instinctively, he raises his fingers to his mouth to identify the cause, and is startled when his touch meets the unforgiving hardness of metal. There’s a barbell piercing running straight through the center of his tongue, the pain of it already fading.  The pain hardly factors anyway, he’s so caught up in awe of the display of magic.

Some of the other charms manifest as rings that fit perfectly around his fingers, and a thin strip of fabric circles tightly around his throat.

The process is startling, to say the least. It’s one thing to have someone tell him that magic exists, and another to see it in action. With all the charms in place, Keith shifts his shoulders, curious about what Shiro had mentioned about concealment. It’s a bizarre feeling — his wings still feel cramped underneath the fabric of his shirt, but he catches an image of himself in a nearby window's glass, and his horns aren’t visible at all. There’s no way the distortion of the glass could cause them to disappear, so whatever Matt’s done has obviously worked.

“Cool,” he breathes, reaching a hand up to touch the spots of his scalp where his horns usually protrude — his fingers wrap around one of the thick, bony parts of a horn, but in the reflection it looks like he’s merely grasping air.

It’s incredible. As the magic settles, Matt explains what each of the charms are meant to do: the tongue piercing is apparently to quell his persuasive abilities (Keith’s not sure he likes the idea of such a useful power being stalled, honestly), the rings are various concealment charms to hide his half-demon appearance, and the necklace he’s sporting will staunch any elemental abilities he may or may not have. Shiro tells him that fire abilities are fairly common in most demons, and although he hasn’t presented any, as of yet, it’s better to be cautious.

The information is a little overwhelming, but Keith’s awed by the clear display of magic and the fact that he’s _way_ in over his head: he didn’t believe any of this was even possible, and it’s obvious that he knows almost nothing in comparison to these two.

“You’ve got your charms,” Matt says to Keith from the doorway, interrupting his musings. His eyes are hard now, like he’s suddenly remembered his blatant dislike. “Now forget where they came from.”

“That’s not reasonable, Matt,” Shiro sighs, settling a hand on the man's shoulder. Keith watches as he flinches imperceptibly, but neither of them say anything about it. “You know he’ll have to check in periodically for regular maintenance."

"Katie can deal with it. I did your little favor."

"Is that where we're at, now?" Shiro asks, voice tense like a wire pulled taut. "'Thanks for the favor, Matt, give me a call the next time you need me to do something for you?'"

"I didn't —” Matt starts, his attention focused solely on Shiro, but then his teeth click shut abruptly, as if he's suddenly remembered that there's someone else present.

Keith doesn't know what's going on, but he's not an idiot. There's something between them that hangs in the air, a strained sharpness that hits him as subtly as a brick. "Thanks," he says after a pause, trying to break through the moment. "I... appreciate the charms." Even if he doesn't entirely understand how they work, or how he became a half-demon that even required concealing magic in the first place.

(Which is an entirely new concept to wrap his mind around.)

"Yeah," Matt responds, but it's absent, like he's not even paying attention to Keith anymore. He and Shiro lock gazes for a moment, before Matt narrows his eyes and heads back into the house.

"I'm sorry about that," he offers. "Matt's... gone through a rough patch with demons. His anger isn't directed at you, specifically. He’ll come around.”

That sounds an awful lot like Shiro expects Keith to _be_ around to see Matt stop treating him like a diseased creature, but Keith doesn’t mention it aloud.  Besides, the human had looked worse than Keith probably did immediately after his crash. He doesn’t know much about Shiro or Matt, but it’s obvious something’s happened between the two of them, and he’s smart enough not to directly bring it up.

Keith sits on the doorstep for a little while after that, trying to reconcile all of the knowledge he’s suddenly acquired with what he’s known about life previously. Shiro sits with him in silence, which Keith is unspeakably grateful for even though he doesn’t entirely know why.

“Doing okay?” he asks, and there’s a thread of concern in his voice that has Keith squinting in suspicion. They’re essentially strangers — granted, strangers of the apparently paranormal variety — so it’s a little odd for someone who doesn’t know him at all to be questioning his mental state. Silent camaraderie is one thing, but this is looking more and more like… friendly concern, and Keith doesn’t understand why the man would give him the time of day. He errs on the side of wary.

“I’m fine,” Keith says. “Not like I was just informed everything I know about reality is a lie, or anything.”

“I’ll take the sarcasm as a good sign,” Shiro says with a laugh, like Keith is a harmless puppy or something. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

He doesn’t entirely trust him, but he _did_ bring him to this house and equip him with charms he apparently needs to blend in with society, so Keith ducks his head to indicate that he’s listening.

"There's a lot you don't know about this world, but you'll need to learn. You're a part of it now, after all." Shiro offers him a smile, but there's something off about it that Keith can't quite figure out. "I have a proposition for you, but I need to know how this happened to you. Your magic is powerful like a newborn’s, although you’re clearly not a child.”

“I was human,” Keith starts, not even sure if that’s correct. “I remember everything — I got into a stupid motorcycle accident and watched myself die.” He doesn’t mention the boy with the blue eyes — even now, he’s not sure that actually happened, or if it was the delusions of a dying man. “I woke up in a morgue, and my body… caught fire? When the flames faded, I had these horns, and wings and a tail. I booked it home and realized a few days later that I could ask people to do things for me and they’d just obey me. They seemed overly happy to do so.”

Shiro looks pensive for a moment. “It explains why you were walking around the city without any kind of charm to control your powers,” he says, finally. “I think your magic has been protecting you — newborns have an innate survival instinct, and your persuasion magic blanketed the fact that you had non-human appendages to humans. I assumed you were a half-demon because your magic doesn’t have the same aura as purebloods, and I think it’s the right call. It would explain why your magic didn’t manifest until after your human half had died.”

Keith considers it. One of his parents was a demon, then?

He’s never known his mother, and his dad died when he was young, so it’s plausible, he supposes. He must be in shock with the information overload, or something, because this knowledge isn’t even the most surprising thing he’s learned all day.

“I can connect you with a demon that can probably get you a lower-tier job, but if I’m going to come in contact with them then I need you to do something for me, too.” Shiro’s words cut through his thoughts.

A job?

Shiro's proposition doesn't sound too bad, especially considering the fact that Keith's essentially squatting in the apartment of his widely-acknowledged deceased self and currently has no source of income. He wonders briefly what kind of currency paranormals use — is it something weird and archaic, like coins? Or human blood? Or are they modernized magic users, confined to the American dollar like the rest of the humans?

“What do you need me to do?” he asks. He has no idea what kinds of jobs paranormal creatures like demons do, either, but if Shiro’s right about anything, it’s that he needs to start learning about this world he’s rapidly becoming a part of.

“Come back in about a week. I should have everything sorted by then.”

With a nod, Keith pushes off the ground and into a standing position. As he leaves, he clicks the barbell of his new tongue piercing against his teeth thoughtfully. It’s not how he expected the day would play out, but he can’t say he’s complaining.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Interesting point of note in this chapter: basically, succubus Keith having an affinity for expensive clothes and material things involving lots of money was one of the first ideas Bron had for this AU! Along with him being a demon and working at an underworld-esque quick cash/loan place and hating his life, this was an absolute character requirement.
> 
> So if you notice a theme with how Keith's starting to change his appearance... yep, total self indulgence on our parts. No regrets here.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's been awhile, but fret not! This fic is actually my NanoWriMo project for the month, so expect to see some pretty frequent updates! Bron and I hope you enjoy this chapter. Lots of dialogue and shifting toward the plot going on here. :3

“You are the absolute _best,_ ” Lance says, eyes wide as he stares down at the slim rectangle resting in the palm of his hand.

“I know,” Pidge says lightly, a quirk to her lips. “But really, I probably should have gotten you one earlier. It’ll be much easier to communicate now that you don’t have to phase in from across the city whenever you need to talk to me.”

Lance has existed for centuries, has seen the development of technology expand from rocks and sticks to the discovery of electricity and all of its resulting countless inventions. This current era, with its dependency on the Internet and computers as small as the size of a human’s hand, has passed in the blink of an eye, incredible discoveries littering the historical timeline. It's somewhat of a wonder to behhold, being alive to witness the rapid expansion.

And now he's a part of that, too.

“I put all of our numbers into your contacts already,” Pidge continues, oblivious to the supreme giddiness rising up in Lance’s chest. “I have to go harvest some blackroot mushrooms for a potion, so you can hang out and figure out how it works while I’m gone.”

The rings on his fingers clink against the glass backing of the phone as Lance tightens his grip around it. He isn’t sure how Pidge continuously manages to overwhelm him with her kindness — it seems almost unbelievable that she’s a human and not some sort of overly-zealous benevolent spirit — but every time he turns around, she’s doing something else that's completely stunning.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, eyes caught by the glowing screen of the phone.

“Of course.” Her words are equally as soft before she brightens, and her next words are playful. “To repay me, you can help me figure out what the hell’s going on with Matt.”

“I have a couple of ideas,” he says lightly. He’s considered telling Pidge about how Matt somehow endeared a divine spirit to him so much that it saved his life, but there’s too much to the story that’s still unexplained. It wouldn’t do to divulge what little information he has until he’s more certain. “I’ll let you know if I find out anything important.”

Pidge slips her own phone out of her pocket and waves it around in the air. “Keep me updated with your new technology, alright?”

Lance nods obediently, and once she’s gone, he flicks through the device’s menu options. He’s hovered behind her enough times while she was on her phone to be vaguely familiar with how the technology works, but now, it’s different. This is _his._

He settles into the plush warmth of Pidge’s comforter and sets to figuring out every aspect of his new cell phone.

 

* * *

 

“Lance, do you have a moment?”

“Uh,” Lance responds intelligently. He’s only just barely phased back into the Holt’s living room after a particularly messy reaping, and he’s caught off-guard by the inquiry. Shiro’s standing awkwardly in the doorway to the kitchen, although thankfully the instinctive (and how _cool_ is that, that Lance has a body with human reactions ingrained into it?) reaction to flinch away from Shiro as soon as he sees him has mostly faded away at this point.

“Give me a second,” he says, gesturing to the blood clinging to his clothing. It’s always rough when humans refuse to accept their death and grab onto him, pleading for salvation before he gets the chance to reap their souls. Tough on his mental state as well as his poor clothing, especially when their deaths are particularly gruesome. Lance slinks out of the room, trying desperately not to get blood on the carpet, and within a few minutes he’s changed into something much less covered in gore. (He vanishes the soiled clothes into nothingness; Pidge insists that washing machines can clean blood-soaked garments, but Lance is pretty sure they were a lost cause.)

“What’s up?” he asks as he moves back into the living room. Shiro hasn’t moved from his spot.

“When you reap, what does the process look like? What do you do with souls?”

It’s kind of an odd question, coming from someone who already has intimate knowledge about the whole process. It’s part of an angel’s duties, to help souls that pass Judgment get to the correct afterlife. “You already know the drill, right? Human souls can’t exist in Limbo, so once a human has died and I’ve grabbed their soul, I cross the realm and the soul’s pulled toward Judgment.”

“There’s no manual for falling from grace,” Shiro admits. He looks away, swallowing thickly. “When it’s spoken about — _if_ it is at all — it’s mentioned as this horrible, crippling thing. Angels are terrified of it, since it’s the one thing that can strip us of our powers.”

The process of ferrying souls across the border of life and death is one that comes as naturally to Lance as breathing in his human body does, now. He couldn’t imagine having it ripped from him, even as dreadful as it gets sometimes. That loss of purpose… Lance has been thinking about Shiro’s plight for awhile, now.

“I don’t know entirely what to do,” Shiro continues. He seems emboldened the more he speaks, like he’s been considering this for a long time. “I can’t access the other realms anymore, not with what little magic I have left. But I came across a half-demon that has some powerful magic, and I think I can figure out a way to take the souls you collect and get them to their rightful locations without traveling through Limbo. If we can do the heavy lifting of transporting them, you’ll just have to call on us instead of phasing into Limbo. It’s no extra work on your part. Are you interested?”

It’s an odd request, that’s for sure. Despite the proclamation that there’s no additional effort on Lance’s side, there really is. Shiro’s asking him to change his routine, though, and there’s a reason for that. He seems almost… desperate for Lance to say yes, to accept his suggestion and restore some of his purpose back to him.

Pidge hasn’t specifically asked him to do her this favor — though he would in a heartbeat if she had, because he owes her _everything_ — but Lance connects the dots. He’s not quite sure exactly what happened with Matt, but he’d gotten into some sort of trouble that led to a divine being interfering to save his life. The two of them have to be close, for Shiro to find it worthwhile to change fate like that, and it’s highly likely that part of whatever’s going on with Matt has to do with his guilt over Shiro’s fall.

And honestly, it’s looking like Shiro needs this. Lance has already forgiven him for what happened when he first awoke — his conversation with Matt had helped clear things up, and after about 700 profuse apologies from Shiro himself, he’s pretty sure the whole event was out of character for the angel. (And besides, Lance is immortal, too. He’s getting better at separating the instinctive cries of a human body from his much more durable consciousness.)

If he can help Shiro, provide him with something to do so he isn’t going stir crazy, it might cheer Matt up… and Matt’s happiness is paramount to Pidge’s happiness.

“What’s in it for me?” Lance asks, though it’s more for show than anything else. He’s pretty sure he already knows his answer. “No offense, but you don’t really have much to offer me.”

Shiro narrows his eyes, mouth open like he’s about to protest, before he seems to realize that Lance isn’t being _too_ serious. “Well… I know Hunk.”

“Hunk?”

“The trickster spirit that makes the baked goods you always pilfer from the kitchen. I’ll give you his number.”

Shit, Lance is glad he played it cool. “Not sure why an _actual_ divine being with magical hands that make the best food on the planet would know you, but I think you have yourself a deal.”

Lance _almost_ feels bad at how quickly Shiro’s face brightens. This is clearly meaningful to him, and he may be a being of death and bad omens, but he isn’t _cruel._

“Thank you,” he breathes. His good arm is clenching onto his scarred hand like a lifeline, and really, it’s the least Lance can do after offering to destroy Shiro when he’d first seen him.

“I want to meet the demon,” Lance says, erring on the side of caution. He knows Shiro — and knows now that their first confrontation had been borne of a desperate, instinctive need to protect and avenge rather than any conscious decision of Shiro’s own — but he doesn’t know this half-demon that might enter the picture.

And honestly, they don’t tend to be a particularly altruistic bunch.

 

* * *

 

 _Are you free today?_ reads Shiro’s text. Shiro’s such a boring texter, all perfect punctuation and properly capitalized letters. Lance _knows_ he could do better, especially since powerful, all-knowing beings such as themselves came into being with the knowledge of countless languages and how to speak and write them. It’s a missed opportunity, honestly.

He’s nowhere near as fun to text as Hunk is — Lance still has yet to meet the spirit in person, but he’s already positive that when he does he’s going to adore him. Hunk’s hilarious, and Lance has never really interacted with trickster spirits, but they seem like they have so much _fun_ in the world that he can’t wait to interact with him… and maybe prank Pidge once or twice.

 _Yeah,_ Lance types back to Shiro, throwing in a smiley-face emoticon. _Want to come over?_

It’s a slow day for his work, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means that humans across his sector are being fairly safe, or at least low-risk, and he’s certainly not going to complain about a lack of death in the area.

Within a handful of seconds, Shiro responds with a quick _On the way,_ which either means there’s some kind of paranormal emergency, or he’s bored and wants to see Lance’s beautiful face. Either way, it’s more interesting than lying here — Pidge is in the basement working on writing a spell for a siren with a cursed throat infection, and as such has banished him from hovering over her shoulder while watching her work.

On the off-chance that there _is_ an actual emergency that Shiro needs him to help out with, Lance fiddles with the rings on his fingers. It requires several charms and glamours for Lance to maintain his human form, but after the disaster with Shiro, he’d worked hard to memorize exactly what each specific ring did. The ones that dampen his magic should be the easiest ones to slip off, followed by the charms that contain him in a human form — he hasn’t come across a situation dire enough to shed them all yet, but it’s better to be cautious.

Once they’re sufficiently rearranged, he heads down to the living room. The room’s dead silent — Matt’s still holed up in his room, which Lance is fairly sure has soundproofing charms, and the wards around the basement door ensure the highest of security protocols. They whisper across his skin as he reaches for the doorknob.

“Shiro’s coming over,” he says once the door’s open and he’s standing at the mouth of the stairway. “Seemed important.”

The sound of metallic clanging rings throughout the basement just before Pidge’s loud cursing reverberates around the room and up to Lance's ears.

“Okay,” Pidge says finally with an exaggerated sigh. “I should probably take a break anyway.”

When she emerges from the stairwell, she’s covered in a dusty powder and dark ink stains her hands. Lance doesn’t know much about spellwriting, other than that it’s a fairly exhausting practice and that the Holts charge _a lot_ for custom jobs.

“You doing alright?”

“Just tired,” Pidge responds, words interrupted by a large, jaw-cracking yawn that serves to prove her point. “Apparently Talia pissed off a selkie and now there’s this huge feud between their families. It’s a pain in the ass constantly undoing the curses they inflict upon each other, but at least the pay’s good.”

Lance frowns. “Let me know if I can do anything to help.”

She snorts in response, swiping an ink-stained hand across her forehead. “You could go up to them in full reaper-mode and tell them that the next one to steal a fucking seal pelt is going to face the pointy end of your scythe?”

“Um,” he says. “I’m really not supposed to like, threaten people? It messes with the flow of energy magic and what if someone _did_ die from a heart attack or something—”

“Just a joke, Lance. Geez.”

Damn. He’s still not the best at picking up on sarcastic humor. He’s about to apologize (even though he knows Pidge hates when he does that, because then he ends up apologizing to her for upsetting her because he apologized in the first place) when a knock sounds at the door. The wards hardly even shudder at the intrusion, which means it’s Shiro.

Pidge opens the door for him, and it's only once it's open that Lance's magic clues him in to the fact that there's more than one presence at the entrance to the Holt home.

“I brought Keith,” Shiro says from the doorway. “He’s the half-demon I found about a week ago.” There’s a pause, before: “Pidge, would you mind letting up on the wards? He can’t come in.”

Pidge hums. “Matt’ll probably be pissed, he just revamped them a few weeks ago. I can alter them to recognize your demon’s particular magic signature, but it’ll take me a couple hours to do?”

“That works,” he says. “For now you can come out and meet him.”

Lance trails behind Pidge as they exit the house — it must be weird being rejected by wards. Pidge had added his signature to all of the protective ones around the Holt home, but he’s not sure it was really necessary; reapers can nullify certain types of magic if needed. It wouldn’t do to be unable to reap a soul because of some lesser wards; the consequences would be catastrophic.

Shiro’s on the front porch, and behind him is the half-demon. He’s tall, with messy dark hair falling around his face that does nothing to hide the horns protruding out of the top of his head. He's obviously not wearing any glamours because his demonic appendages are clearly visible, but there's a dark choker around his neck that emanates Matt's magic.

He’s also very, _very_ attractive.

Lance isn’t quite sure what to make of this new knowledge, but it turns out he doesn’t really have the time to process it, anyway. There’s a split second before the demon’s eyes meet Lance’s, and the moment they do, he rears back with a choked-off noise of fear.

 _“You,”_ Keith gasps, eyes wide and frantic. He looks like a wild animal backed into a corner, desperate to flee but unable to confront the threat trapping him in the first place.

“Me?” Lance squeaks. He looks down at himself — maybe one of his limiters broke, and that’s why the demon is staring at him with unbridled terror? But — no, his gaze meets nothing but the dark denim of his pants and a distinct lack of reaper aura surrounding him. Full-blooded demons are a bit more adept at identifying higher paranormal beings, but Shiro had mentioned him being a half-blood, so it’s odd that he’s panicking this quickly. “Are — are you okay?”

He makes the mistake of taking a step forward, trying to remember what Pidge and Colleen had taught him about human reactions and attempts to comfort those in need — but Keith flinches backward, taking a stumbling step away from Lance’s outstretched hand.

“Don’t touch me,” he snarls, voice high and thready. “You — you _killed_ me!”

Oh. Well, that’s fair.

“Look, it wasn’t anything personal?” Lance hedges. “I was just… doing my job.” He thinks about taking off some of his charms to show Keith his true form, but he decides against it. Keith looks terrified as it is, and it probably isn’t a good idea to startle him any further with death magic. “I’m a reaper, and your time was up.”

He doesn't specifically remember reaping this guy's soul, to be honest, although it _is_ interesting how he didn’t seem to stay dead. Lance supposes having demon blood coursing through your veins will do that to you. Persistent fuckers.

“Whaaat,” Pidge whines, her high voice cutting through the tension of the room. “You got to see him reap your soul? That’s so _cool._ Lance never lets me come along with him on jobs. Says it’s too dangerous.”

Okay, so it’s a white lie. Lance has taken countless souls from crowded areas and never accidentally reaped the wrong one, but he’s not going to tell Pidge that. (It has more to do with the emotional trauma that comes with visiting so many death scenes. Lance is literally _made_ to do this one job, but he can hardly handle it on bad days. Pidge is too… good to succumb to that, even if she insists that she wants to tag along because of scientific curiosity.)

“Cool,” Keith repeats distantly, still staring at Lance like he’s about to inflict Soul Reaping #2. “I woke up in a morgue.”

“Sounds like the _definition_ of cool to me, demon boy. Wait, _you’re_ the body that spontaneously combusted at Dawson’s morgue a few weeks ago?”

“Y… es? Wait, how do you know about that? There wasn’t anyone around when I woke up—"

“You have so much to learn,” Pidge drawls, looking up at Keith from behind her round glasses. “I keep tabs on everything even remotely suspicious that happens in the city, just in case it’s related to magic usage. It’s a lot easier to cover things up if I’m aware of them right as they happen.”

Sometimes Lance forgets that the Holts have a responsibility other than just marketing their magical skills to the paranormal community — they also strive to maintain peace (and in most cases, conceal the fact that paranormals even exist) between supernatural entities and the magic-less humans they live around. It makes sense that something defying the laws of nature like a spontaneously combusting corpse would be on Pidge’s radar.

“If reapers exist,” Keith starts, “then what else is there? I know Shiro’s an angel, and you’re some sort of… mage, right?”

Pidge looks like she’s about to start vibrating with excitement. Lance is beginning to think she has a problem with adopting lost and forlorn paranormals so that she can impart knowledge onto them. “We should take you to Allura’s,” she says. “Most of the creatures you’re thinking of right now are real.”

 _Allura’s?_ That’s an unfamiliar name, even to Lance.

“Even _vampires?”_   yelps Keith. “I knew it!”

They watch as Pidge and Keith devolve into some sort of discussion about something called a _Bigfoot._

“I’ve never seen him act like this before,” Shiro says, watching the two of them, and he looks like he’s about to smile.

Lance makes a thoughtful noise before turning to him. “How’d you find a half-demon willing to cooperate with you?”

“He’s practically an infant,” Shiro admits. “I didn’t know you were the one to reap him, but if he recognizes your form, then it had to have been recently. He doesn’t know anything about us.”

“Do you know what kind of demon, at least?”

He hesitates, which strikes Lance as odd. “Something minor, I’m sure. He has some persuasion ability, so Matt crafted him a few concealment charms and a dampener so he doesn’t do anything irrational.”

That probably explains it. Shiro and Matt still aren’t on the best of terms, so involving him in a task like this has probably caused some unwanted tension. Hm, it's possible Keith's demonic origins are part of the reason why Matt's been so tense lately. It's definitely something to consider.

Lance glances over to the half-demon, where Pidge is excitedly bombarding him with questions. Between the three of them, they could feasibly do this. Shiro’s plan doesn’t sound completely unrealistic, if he can bridge the gap between demonic and angelic magic to create an alternative for soul harvesting without the utilization of Limbo. Sure, it’s significantly more work than Lance is used to; typically, the process of reaping doesn’t even involve face-to-face contact with anyone other than his victim, but with Pidge’s gift of a cell phone, it really isn’t too much work to contact Shiro during a reaping.

There’s also something about the idea of being part of a _team_ that sings in Lance’s chest, makes his heart almost hurt with how much he yearns to help them. He’s been solitary for so long, and he’d be a fool not to jump at this kind of opportunity to belong and have people who need him for something other than carrying the omen of death.

“This could work. What do you think?” Shiro seems eager, now. It's a far cry from the first couple of months, where he'd despondently avoid the Holt home except to have short, angry conversations with Matt that tended to end with him being yelled at to leave.

What Lance  _really_ thinks is that Shiro’s God is probably losing his mind right about now. A fallen angel, a half-demon, and a reaper of death, all working together.

It kind of sounds like one of those bad jokes that Sam’s always telling.

 

* * *

 

Things get weird after Lance meets Keith. It’s been a handful of months now — and Lance is still not entirely used to actually _counting_ human time, but he’s getting better — since Pidge’s charms have completely settled, and he had (naively) begun to think he was finally getting the hang of all of his various body functions and quirks. He’s learned so much about humans in such a short amount of time, and in a way he had been unable to do as a mere observer. They’re fascinating creatures — he’s always been captivated by him, even when they were just prey and not his _friends_ — but now he’s been given the opportunity to participate human life instead of merely watching from the sidelines.

Lance’s life has become one of comparisons: there is the before, where he existed as a reaper of death and performed his duties for all eternity, and there is the _now._ He’s much more fond of where he’s at currently, because existing is so much different from _living._ The emotions he feels, the experiences his body is going through... so far, they've been an exhilarating, wonderful experience.

This, though.... this new development isn’t one he’s sure he likes.

He’s not a complete idiot — he knows what sex is. He’s seen pretty much everything there is to see on Earth, even the bizarrely kinky stuff. (And maybe Lance doesn’t have a huge, comprehensive understanding for what is radically deviant, but he’s had to reap a few souls who got too… zealous with their sexual exploits, and even  _he_ could acknowledge they probably weren’t very socially acceptable. No judgment coming from him, though.)

So. He knows what sex is. He just never imagined those urges happening to _him._

It starts with dreams. (He’d brought it up with Pidge exactly once, wherein she had looked positively horrified and choked out something along the lines of, “ _Gross,_ Lance, I’m glad your body functions work properly but that doesn’t mean I need to _hear_ about all of them!”)

So. His reactions (and subsequent dreams) are normal, but that doesn’t make them any less mortifying.

Lance hadn’t experienced these changes until after he’d met Keith, and he’s sure that means something. Problem is, he doesn’t really have anyone to talk to about it. Shiro’s out of the question — he’s not even sure divine beings _have_ the body parts that are currently making Lance’s life difficult. Matt still recoils whenever Lance uses even an ounce of his magic around him, so that’s not an option, either. He even tries searching the Internet for answers on his phone, but quickly shuts it down after coming across some _very_ vivid descriptions that he doesn’t feel prepared to deal with quite yet.

The only logical conclusion that Lance can come up with is that he’s just… _attracted_ to Keith. He hadn’t experienced it before because his only interactions were with the Holts and Shiro, who pretty much ingrained the idea of _this is a threat and not a mate_ into his mind and body upon their first encounter.

Humans had always been of interest to him, but never in the way of breeding or procreating. They’d been a curiosity, so full of life and vitality wrapped up with the enigmatic presence of a soul. As an ephemeral being brought into existence by the oldest, most powerful magic of necessity, he had never felt this… this need, to couple with other humans he finds attractive.

Now that his consciousness is housed in a human body, though, it would appear he’s truly starting to act human in more ways than one.

At least, he thinks that’s what’s happening. He certainly wakes up, drenched in sweat and _other_ fluids, after very pleasant dreams about Keith’s mouth and his own hands wrapped around those demonic horns and his thick, dark hair —

Honestly, he mostly just wishes he could’ve had some kind of warning about the whole erection thing — it make things fairly uncomfortable.

 

* * *

 

Lance doesn’t know any of the Fae particularly well. It’s not like there’s bad blood between their factions or anything, but it’s nearly impossible to reap an immortal being, and so his brushes with them have been confined to the instances where humans were foolish enough to fall prey to conniving fairies.

The gorgeous woman with cascading white hair that Pidge introduced as Allura isn’t just any Fae, though. Lance knows enough about them to know when he’s looking at royalty, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t just a little bit daunted by this meeting.

“You’re sure the charms will hold?” Allura asks, looking at Lance’s hands warily.

“I made them myself,” Pidge responds. “I mean — we’ve been testing them for months, now, and they’ve held pretty well. The only time they lose potency is when he’s summoning his scythe, so we’ll obviously avoid that.”

“We run a huge risk by allowing him inside.” It’s weird to be spoken of like he isn’t standing there along with the two of them, but Lance gets it. Superstitions about reapers exist for a good reason, and Pidge truly is an outlier when it comes to members of the paranormal community interacting with him. Allura's actually responding pretty positively to his presence, even knowing what he truly is. It has him overly hopeful about the outcome of Pidge's plea.

“Nobody’s going to just _assume_ he’s a reaper, at least,” Pidge tries. “His human form is stable, and if he refrains from using magic then he just looks like a glamoured demon. Lance, you won't use any magic while inside Altea, right?”

Allura looks between the two of them before sighing resignedly. “Alright, but never alone. I want you or Matt with him whenever you step through the doors. And you—“ here she turns to Lance, who isn’t sure if he’s supposed to bow or acknowledge who she is or _what_ “—come by the morning before the new moon. I want to make sure Fae magic won’t interfere with Pidge’s spells and charms, and I’d prefer to do it when the club’s empty, just in case.”

“Yes, princess.” She seems appeased by his response, which means he isn’t about to get smiting down by Fae magic for addressing her improperly. Smooth as silk.

 

* * *

 

Pidge leads him through the city on the day Allura requested they meet. Shiro’s with them, mentioning an acquaintance he wants to get in contact with, and so they traverse down the winding concrete paths until they’re located in front of a heavily glamoured building.

“Shiro!” Allura greets as she steps outside. “You’re looking better. Hello, Pidge. Lance.”

There’s a redheaded Fae along with her with impressive facial hair that introduces himself as Coran, and Lance is startled by how firm his handshake is when he outstretches an arm as a greeting — Sam had taught him that one, and it appears to have gone over well, judging by the flashing smile Coran shoots him.

“Might as well get it over with,” Allura says apprehensively. “The wards are ancient, Lance, and so I’d like to see how they handle the combination of yours and Pidge’s magic in case something goes wrong.”

Fae magic is archaic, and the oldest of the Seelie court can hold their own against higher beings. It’s certainly nothing to take lightly, and Lance steels himself as he moves toward the entrance Allura and Coran came out of.

Everyone collectively seems to hold their breath as Lance crosses over the threshold, but nothing happens. He feels the magic of the wards, bright as Fae magic always is, but they don’t appear to interfere with Pidge’s charms, and there’s nothing but a distant hum of acknowledgement as they recognize his own magic.

Altea is impressive, he thinks as he sweeps his gaze across the room. The space is huge, branching off into what looks like a bar and a dining area, while the rest of the expansive room features a dance floor and several couches and chairs to lounge on. It looks like most human clubs do, though Lance knows that appearances can be deceiving.

“Another tallymark for my _amazing_ charms,” Pidge crows, after it’s clear Lance isn’t about to destabilize and fill the space with reaper aura and magic. “I told you, Allura! No problem at all.”

Allura and Coran do look impressed. “Whenever you’re here,” she reminds Lance, “ _all_ of your charms remain on. We’ve never allowed reapers into this space before, and I’m willing to accept you as a trial run if you’ll be careful. It could cause huge panic if your true nature was revealed on a crowded night.”

“Of course,” Lance responds instantly. This is an incredible experience, and he’s not going to do anything to risk it.

“If you’re going to be a patron of Altea, you must know its rules,” Allura begins, sweeping a hand in the air to show off the expansive floor of the club. “We are a neutral space. Stepping through the door means you accept the conditions of the extensive Fae wards surrounding it — and our most significant condition is that there is no fighting or violence allowed. Anyone who violates this, feuds and warring factions included, will promptly experience excruciating pain and be banished for all eternity. It’s a rule my father established centuries ago, and under it Altea has flourished.”

Lance has to bite down on his lip to silence a startled burst of laughter. Allura refers to her father like he’s just some random relative, and not the _king of the Fae._ King Alfor’s been in power for even longer than Lance has existed, and he’s pretty sure that the only reason this locale exists at all is because of his massive power and respect her father has commanded in the magical world for centuries.

He’s _almost_ curious enough to ask what would happen if someone died of natural causes within its walls and he was summoned to reap a soul, but it _is_ an oddly specific hypothetical, so he refrains.

“What about humans?” he asks instead. “What happens if one of them stumbles inside?” He can’t imagine it’d go over well, not with vampires and other predators higher on the food chain than people loitering around in a space specifically designed for paranormals to act like themselves.

“The entire club is spelled to be invisible to anyone without a magical signature,” Allura replies. “It’s a failsafe to keep them from even realizing it exists. We haven’t had a problem yet.”

Makes sense. Lance turns to look at Pidge, considering. Mundane humans are incapable of magic, although a handful that undergo traumatic experiences or close brushes with the paranormal world have, in the past, absorbed some energy or magic to gain access to their world. It’s rare, though.

“Our family has ancient Fae connections,” Pidge explains, anticipating the question. “Most of the druid blood’s gone in our lineage is gone by now, but we still have ties to the magic realm. All of us have full access to Altea.”

Altea’s beautiful, even as empty as it is right now. And it means he’ll be able to interact with the entirety of the magical community on a level equal to him. He’s not on the periphery, anymore, and it’s an exhilarating feeling.

Lance grins. He can’t wait to come back when it’s populated.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thace grins down at him, and for some reason it sends a chill racing down Keith’s spine. “Welcome to your new job.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bumped up the rating and updated tags for this update, haha.

Shiro seems to think it’s a good idea for Keith to tag along with Lance on some of his reapings. This would be well and good, except for the fact that Lance can apparently _teleport_ wherever he wants to go, and Keith's only mode of transportation is a totaled motorcycle that he couldn’t claim from a junkyard even if he wanted to because oh, yeah, he’s legally _dead._

Public transportation, Keith thinks as he’s shoved up against the freezing cold window of an overcrowded bus for the third time in as many minutes, is a fate worse than death.

His wings feel stifled underneath his clothes even without the uncomfortable closeness of countless human bodies surrounding him, and right now it's almost unbearable. He has a permanent scowl etched onto his face, and passes the time by imagining goring some of the nearby passengers with his horns. (He gets  _very_ imaginative.) When he makes it to the correct stop, he hurries off the bus almost before it’s stopped entirely, over-eager to escape the scent of B.O. and morning breath that had permeated the vehicle.

This is _not_ going to become a regular thing, he swears. He doesn’t care what it takes — Lance is going to figure out a fucking way to teleport him to reaping locations, or Shiro’s becoming his personal chauffer.

“Thanks for making me come halfway across the city, asshole,” Keith huffs as he finally approaches Lance, who’s lounging on a bench and looks like he’s been waiting for some time.

The reaper hardly spares him a glance, too preoccupied with an elderly couple that’s walking arm-in-arm down the street. “Can’t you get a car or something?”

“That sounds like a lovely idea,” he says sarcastically. “Let me just waltz into a dealership and spend money I don’t have to buy a car under my dead name.”

Lance shifts his gaze to squint at him. “Are you always this sassy?”

“Next time,” Keith bites out, trying to rein in his temper. It’s a challenge, but it’s better than throwing a punch at the immortal being that has already snuffed out his life once. “Next time, you can witness the wonders of public transit with me.”

“It sounds intriguing!” Lance says, and he has the gall to sound _honest_ about it. “Pidge says I should see more of how humans live now that I can — oh, it’s time.”

Keith has a million scathing retorts on the tip of his tongue, but he swallows the words down, if only because he _is_ kind of excited to see what a reaping looks like when he’s not the intended victim. He wonders briefly how Lance is so sure that someone’s impending death is looming over them, but he supposes that _is_ part of his job description.

He watches as Lance takes a deep breath, almost like he’s steeling himself for what’s to come, before he slips a few rings off of his metal-clad hands.

Almost immediately, Keith feels a rush of magic surrounding him and the immediate vicinity. He doesn’t know much about Lance’s charms — hell, he hardly knows how his _own_ work — but it’s clear that at least some of them contain his magic so he’s not walking around like an oppressive force of death on a regular basis.

If Keith didn’t already have a healthy aversion to creatures of death due to his own personal encounters, he’d sure as hell have one now.

Lance’s magic is almost _suffocating._ There’s no sensual trace of his ability — Keith can’t see anything different about him, nor smell it — but his skin prickles in awareness, and he feels almost overwhelmed by the distinct aura of decay that clings to him. This magic is nothing like the soft whisper of Matt’s as his charms had settled around Keith, or even the crisp cleanness that Shiro carries with him. It’s much more stark than anything he’s come across, defined by the death that Lance brings.

Keith shudders fiercely.

He thought it was bad enough being able to feel the stifling potency of Lance’s aura, but then Lance takes another ring off, and his entire being — flickers. It’s subtle, almost like his body is just blurred around the edges, but then tendrils of something dark spill away to surround him. Smoke swirls around him without the limiters to contain it, and Keith has to look away, swallowing hard, because now… now he truly looks like he did when he’d taken Keith’s life.

Lance doesn’t look back as he moves forward, path a direct course to the old man and woman. They don’t suspect anything, and why should they? Nobody around them seems to even notice Lance anymore, and Keith is the only one who watches in wide-eyed horror and anticipation.

He summons his scythe, then, and in the same moment Keith’s stomach bottoms out. It’s a visceral reaction, one borne of instinct after knowing exactly _what_ the weapon’s capable of, and he stands, shock-still, as Lance effortlessly runs the metal of the scythe through the elderly man’s chest. Almost immediately, the man seizes, body wracked with the trembles that come with the failure of his body’s organs.

The commotion draws the attention of all near passerby, and within seconds shouts for help and panicked noises fill the air. Distantly, Keith knows that this is something that happens often, that heart attacks and strokes and aneurysms are natural and deadly, but seeing it in person is something else. Knowing now that it’s Lance’s hand delivering the death sentence is — shocking, to say the least.

A young woman is frantically delivering CPR to the old man’s body, but it’s no use. Keith can see the man’s spirit — his soul? — firmly attached to Lance’s scythe even as he pulls it away from his corporeal form, and Keith’s hit with a distinct sense of deja vu. Is this what it had looked like, when he’d—?

It’s only then that Lance turns and locks eyes with him. Keith can’t tear his gaze away from the glowing blue of his irises, and his lips move with unheard words as he brushes a hand against the old man’s face. In the next instant, his soul vanishes along with Lance’s summoned weapon.

Lance looks — apologetic, after the soul’s disappeared, and Keith tells himself that’s the only reason he doesn’t say anything after Lance returns to his side.

 

* * *

 

The reaping sticks with him, even as he’s dragged around by Shiro to the site of the new job he apparently has.

“They owe me a favor,” Shiro says, as though he needs to justify why a divine creature would bother with low-level demons. Keith doesn’t know much about the paranormal world, but he’s pretty sure the two have some pretty significant ideological clashes.

“Thace,” Shiro greets as a stern-faced man approaches them. He’s flanked by a few other demons who haven’t bothered to conceal their horns or the almost purplish hue to their skin.

“Appreciate you bringing us the new recruit,” Thace returns, turning his gaze toward Keith. He straightens up in an almost-challenge of the appraisal.

“We’ll take it from here,” one of the demons says, shooting Shiro a sharp glance.

Shiro hadn’t said anything about being on bad terms with demons, but it doesn’t seem like they’re too fond of him, either. There are clearly some politics here that Keith’s not privy to — at least none of the demons seem to outright reject _him_ , possibly because of the favor they apparently owe Shiro. Or the demonic blood that runs through him. He’s not sure.

Nodding as though he'd expected this turn of events, Shiro turns to Keith. “Of course. Remember what I said, okay?”

He’s not sure if Shiro’s referencing the fact that they’re cutting a deal together with this harvesting souls thing, or something else. Either way, this is already looking like a much easier job prospect than what Lance has to do.

Once Shiro departs, Thace takes him through the building, though it looks more like an abandoned warehouse than any kind of place that looks like it contains a reputable business.

“There are different kinds of magic,” he explains as Keith trails behind him. His voice echoes around the barren walls of the warehouse as he speaks. “Elemental magic is typically what lesser demons possess, and I’m sure you’re among them. More powerful beings dwell in life and blood magic, but that’s above your paygrade.”

Keith has yet to manifest any particular ability — other than the concealment and the persuasion — but it would be awesome to control elements. He’s always loved watching the unpredictable flicker of fire, and imagines for the briefest of moments being able to _control_ such a thing.

“Soul magic’s a little trickier, though,” Thace continues. They’ve moved out of abandoned warehouse territory and into a sectioned-off area that looks a bit more functional and lived-in. It looks an awful lot like an office space, with neatly divided cubicles and everything, and a feeling of dread overcomes him. “Ever heard of making a deal with the devil?”

“Of course,” he responds. Who hasn’t, honestly? Keith supposes the stories must’ve been rooted in some element of truth, since demons clearly exist in the same space as humankind.

“Tampering with a pure soul is a one-way ticket to an angel smiting you where you stand, but the moment a human _willfully_ offers theirs up, it’s free game to us.” Thace grins. “That’s where you come in. A lot of us have enchantments that alert us when someone’s about to gamble with their soul, and you’re going to organize the contracts that are written after they’ve committed so we can hold them accountable when it’s time to pay up.”

It sounds manipulative as fuck, but also devious. He wonders how long it’ll take before he can get involved directly in the process — and maybe if he’ll be able to find out which of the sons of a bitches he used to race with had made some dirty deals to win races against him.

Then Thace leads him to an empty cubicle with overflowing cabinets, and all the excitement Keith had been feeling about dealing in the soul magic business abruptly vanishes.

Thace grins down at him, and for some reason it sends a chill racing down Keith’s spine. “Welcome to your new job.”

 

* * *

 

“Really?” Keith asks disbelievingly, staring down at the elegantly scripted paper on the desk he’s seated at. Before his eyes, the words appear on the otherwise pristine parchment, and the unmistakable ozone-tinged aura of magic surrounds it. He rereads the words once, then twice to make sure he’s comprehending it correctly.

“Mm?” one of the demons passing by his work station — which is really just a laughable small office cubicle space — queries at his outburst.

Keith thinks the demon’s name is Ulak, or something similar. Ulaz, maybe. (Full-blooded demons appear to have the most bizarre naming practices he’s ever heard of before, and his best friend pre-death had been a guy named _Rolo._ Yeah, like the candy.)

“This woman just sold her soul for a new season of some TV show that got cancelled years ago,” he says, derision clear in his words.

Ulaz snorts. “Get used to it, kid. Humans are complete idiots.”

This is, undoubtedly, the worst fucking job Keith’s ever had, and he spent 300 hours of community service _cleaning toilets_ after getting caught drawing graffiti back when he was in high school. “I can’t believe this.”

“They’re not always awful?” Ulaz says, but the smirk on his lips belies his words. “Just… most of the time.”

“There are seven-hundred-and-fifteen soul contracts in this” — here Keith kicks a nearby filing cabinet, which rings out with a sad metallic noise — “that include the most arbitrary reasons I have _ever_ seen for somebody to sell their soul.”

This is the absolute worst. He’s not meant for clerical deskwork. There’s a reason he died doing what he loved — the feel of a bike between his legs and the rush of a adrenaline pumping through his blood during a race is infinitely more appealing than this tedious bullshit.

Ulaz tries to placate him. “At least there are a few with expiration dates coming up soon. Collecting souls is absolutely the best part of the job.”

From across the hall of his cubicle, Keith hears someone laughing. It sounds awfully like that guy he’d run into earlier trying to find a bathroom — Haxus, he recalls — and he’s fairly confident that he’s being mocked right about now.

He scowls before looking down at the notes he’d taken earlier. The contracts that Ulaz is talking about expire in two _years._

_Fuck._

 

* * *

 

“Keith, stop _wanting_ people to default on their contracts and lose their souls. That's kind of fucked up, even for a demon."

“They deserve it. They all deserve it.”

 

* * *

 

“You need to learn to control your magic,” Pidge says offhandedly the next time he comes by her house. He’s waiting for Shiro to show up, and is definitely not looking forward to trading insults with Lance, who is (disappointingly) out of the house when he arrives.

“I’m controlling my magic fine,” he replies, eyes narrowed. He hasn’t had any accidents, despite what Shiro had said about him potentially having an elemental affinity.

“Well, _duh,_ you’re covered in suppressors. That’s kind of their job. It would be really inconvenient for both of us to have to maintain all of them forever, though, so it really is a smart idea to have you start training so you can handle most of your abilities without the assistance.” Pidge has hardly finished speaking the words before she’s intruding on his personal space, tugging at the choker around his neck like she can discern its magical properties at a glance. (Shit, _can_ she?)

“Glad to know you’re so charitable and willing to help,” he mutters, craning his neck away from her prying fingers.

Pidge tosses him a look, which is somehow impressive despite the foot-and-a-half in height that Keith has on her. “Do you even know how much it would normally cost you for all of the charms you’re wearing? You’re lucky Shiro likes you.”

He frowns at the reminder that he’s basically indebted to these people. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, knowing that he _owes_ them. It’s very much unlike how he’d lived before… well, before dying.

“It’s like…” Pidge continues, humming thoughtfully. “You know how babies have to learn how to walk and talk and eventually stop shitting in diapers? Right now, you’re the baby on wobbly legs. Everyone around you is an adult, so it’s our responsibility to make sure you don’t accidentally die and can grow up into a—”

Keith is _not_ a fan of this particular comparison. “Okay, okay, enough with the metaphor, I _get_ it, I don’t know anything—”

Pidge’s laugh interrupts him. “Calm down, okay? That’s why I’m here. The first thing you need to learn is how to focus, because it’s basically impossible to get magic to do what you want if you don’t even know what you want in the first place…”

 

* * *

 

Keith opens his eyes to a bright, comfortable-looking room. He feels lightheaded, like there's something not quite right with him. In addition, he doesn't recognize his surroundings, although there's no instinctive raising of his hackles at being in an unfamiliar space, so it doesn't seem too dangerous. In fact, the more he stares, the hazier the world looks around the edges, and then it clicks: this must be a dream. He seems to be in control of his faculties, as well, which is interesting. He’s never lucid dreamed before, but he’s not about to miss out on the chance to explore while he’s been granted such an ability. His charms are also absent: the flutter of his wings indicate that they’re free from the confines of his shirt, and his tail snakes lazily around the curve of one leg.

Lucid dreaming in a nonrestrictive environment is interesting, he thinks. He wanders for awhile, investigating the nondescript room he's ended up in. Outside of it is an equally nondescript hallway, and the plush carpeting beneath his feet silences his footsteps as he moves through it. The hallway seems to go on forever, marked by doors that break up the white walls periodically. He tries some of the doorknobs only to find that they're locked, and he's feeling serene enough that it's too much of a pain to ram his shoulder against them to break them open. He'll just... see if there's one that's unlocked.

Time hardly seems to pass before Keith hears a noise. It's coming from behind a door just up ahead, something quiet and muffled, and Keith stops in front of it, trying to parse the sound. It’s definitely human, low and humming with an urgency that Keith’s magic can pick up on even through the solid wood of a door.

He grasps the knob and turns it. Unsurprisingly, it's unlocked, and he opens the door, curious to see what his dream is trying to show him.

Somehow… it’s Lance.

Lance, sprawled out on a luxurious-looking bed that fills up the entirety of the room it's sitting in. And he looks  _awfully_ busy.

Seeing the reaper naked and writhing in silky-looking sheets with a fist around his dick is definitely one of the  _last_ things Keith had been expecting, but he's hardly complaining. The sight's an incredible one, intimate and charged with tension when a small whimper pushes past Lance's lips as he continues to touch himself. The reaper hardly seems to notice his presence, as distracted by pleasure as he currently is, and Keith can feel something unrecognizable simmering just beneath his skin as he drinks in the sight before him. His heartbeat thuds in his ears, loud and oppressive as his pulse picks up, and the the haziness around his vision snaps into perfect clarity.

He feels like a man possessed with how he surges forward, feeling a desperate _need_ to intervene, to interrupt Lance’s self-directed focus so that the brunet is focusing on him, instead.

“Well,” he says, but his voice comes out low and heady, something in his subconscious purring like a satisfied cat as he approaches the bedside. “What do we have here?”

Lance yelps, blue eyes flashing up toward Keith as he realizes he isn’t alone. “What—” he gasps, scrambling to try and cover himself. “How are you _here?_ ”

“You look like you’re having fun,” he says, although that does nothing to answer the question. He’s not too sure himself, but if it’s a dream, then explanations aren’t _really_ necessary. Especially not when his mind has essentially delivered Lance on a platter to him. Lance and his magic may be fearful in the waking world, but he seems softer, more vulnerable here. Less like an immortal creature of death and more… human, almost.

“Keith? What are you doing?” Lance’s voice startles him out of his thoughts. Without noticing, he’s inched closer toward the bed Lance is on until his knees are brushing against the soft fabric of the sheets. The reaper looks a little less terrified about his sudden interruption, although the flush covering his cheeks has yet to dissipate, and Keith takes the opportunity to absorb the embarrassed arousal of the man stretched out before him.

“So rude to get started without me,” he says lowly in response to the unanswered question hanging in the air. The desire his subconscious has decided to reveal to him now is anything _but_ rude, but even if this Lance is just a figment of his imagination, he finds himself wanting to goad him into reaction.

“ _You’re_ the one invading _my_ privacy,” Lance retorts, pouting, and it sounds so _real_ and similar to the real iteration of the reaper that Keith shivers in anticipation. He still doesn’t know the other very well, isn’t sure he’s even capable of acting in a sexual capacity, those inquiries are entirely irrelevant here. Right now, there’s a naked, hard immortal being in a bed just inches away from him, and Keith knows a present when he sees one.

Despite his words, Lance looks eager for Keith to touch him — even with a sheet haphazardly tugged up to cover himself, Keith can see the outline of his hardness beneath it, and he knows with complete certainty that if this dream version of Lance had been truly upset by his intrusion then they’d be fighting right now instead of hovering within feet of each other, surrounded by an entirely different sort of tension. His protests are merely token words to fill the air, and Keith’s tempted to call his bluff. Tempted to walk away, or to strip just out of Lance’s reach and show him exactly how _rude_ it is to tease someone with visions of their bodies without being allowed to touch.

Hmm. Maybe another time, if his mind deigns to grant him another fantasy similar to this. Right now, Keith _wants._

Decision made, he wastes no further time in crawling onto the bed until he’s hovering over Lance’s body, arms propping him up so that he’s mere inches away from warm, exposed skin. Keith’s tail unwinds lazily and brushes against Lance's leg; he lets out a breathy noise at the action, and oh, god, Keith has been around the block a few times and had his fair share of fun, captivating romps between the sheets before, but this… this is sublime.

Judging by Lance’s reactions, Keith’s subconscious must’ve taken into account that Lance’s human form is still so new to him — and really, six months within a human body is _no_ time at all to learn the ins and outs of your own responses to touch. He’s even more sensitive than a virgin, probably.

Keith’s going to have some fun with this.

He can’t help but smirk, feeling like a cat who’s caught the canary as he slowly, deliberately works Lance’s fingers free of the sheets they’re grabbing onto like a lifeline. He’s so pliant, staring in disbelief at Keith’s actions, that it’s no effort at all to circle his fingers around Lance’s thin wrists and tug until both arms are pulled above him, caught in Keith’s grasp.

Arching over him with his knees digging into the mattress and his hands restraining Lance’s own, Keith can’t help but grind his hips down against Lance’s own. Really, he’s not sure if even the strongest man could resist such temptation.

“Ah,” Lance keens, bucking his hips upwards in a plea for friction. “That f-feels so good—”

Keith leans back on his heels to take in the sight before him: Lance is gorgeous, all tanned skin and lithe limbs stretched out on display against the silky sheets, and Keith swallows before finally giving into the urge to _devour._

He makes sure to leave not a single inch of Lance’s skin untouched; with Lance’s arms bound, he’s entirely at Keith’s mercy, and Keith starts with gentle kisses across his exposed collarbones. They don’t remain gentle for long, though, and the drag of his teeth and tongue quickly take their place. Lance tastes of sweat and the underlying tinge of magic, almost spicy with its intensity, and Keith sets about pulling Lance’s skin between his teeth and sucking hard bruises into it.

If he looked pretty before, he looks even more beautiful now, with Keith’s marks and bites trailing across his exposed body.

“I like you like this,” Keith purrs, trailing the pads of his fingers across Lance’s abdomen. His stomach clenches in response to the touch, and he looks absolutely debauched. “Obedient, and far less annoying.”

He doesn’t just feel the desire to ruin Lance — he _needs_  to _._ It's almost frenzied, how badly Keith wants to reduce him to begging and writhing against the sheets until Keith’s hands, mouth, cock are the only things he can think of, pressing against him and _into_ him —

Keith moans against Lance’s skin, trying to rein in his thoughts before he comes without actually touching his own dick. He’s desperate to ravish the man beneath him, and hesitates for only a second, but — it’s a dream, right? He can ravish whoever the hell he wants. This is his own subconscious.

Speaking of… one interesting perk of this dream world: when he thinks hard enough about wanting something, it appears. A discreet bottle of lubricant pops into existence alongside Lance’s squirming body, and Keith hums satisfactorily before thumbing the cap of it open with a soft _click._

Lance tenses at the noise, but doesn’t make any sort of verbal protest. Surely he’s smart enough to connect the dots at this point, but just in case Keith makes a show of dribbling the lube over his fingers just above Lance’s wide eyes. They’re dark with lust, pupils blown out entirely, and he watches the action with minute attention.

“Relax,” he murmurs reassuringly, and there’s a thread of something in his voice that reminds him of when he’d been on the streets before meeting Shiro, convincing guileless humans to do his bidding. He doesn’t seem to be wearing any charms right now — even the barbell piercing through his tongue is absent — but he’s not positive his half-demon magic is even capable of persuading a higher being like a reaper to obey him in the real world, let alone a dreamscape.

Lance goes slack beneath him as soon as he’s breathed the word, though, and Keith grins darkly. A pliant, obedient Lance is just too good of an opportunity to pass up.

It takes no time at all to slide his hand down the curve of Lance’s hip until he’s brushing against Lance’s entrance, which elicits a full-body jolt and another noise that bursts past his lips and cannot be mistaken for anything but pleasure.

“I h-haven’t—” Lance stutters, but he doesn’t manage to finish whatever thought he’s trying to express aloud, because his words dissolve into incoherent whimpers as soon as Keith pushes a finger into him. He’s so delightfully responsive, and for an instant Keith envisions fucking him through multiple orgasms, forcing him to feel so oversensitive with pleasure and sensation that he just _drops —_

All in due time, though. Right now, Keith’s not sure he can last that long, which means Lance definitely can’t. He focuses on the slick push and pull of his finger as he stretches Lance out, cock throbbing at the mere idea of fucking into that tight heat. The needy wail of Lance’s voice fills the room, and Keith wishes, just for a moment, that this were real and not a dream. If Lance were actually _his,_ he could elicit these noises at any given time… but want not waste not, and he’ll have to settle for this utterly wonderful dreamscape.

He leans down to claim Lance’s lips with his own. It’s a shame to shut up the positively gorgeous moans spilling out of his mouth, but kissing brings with it a different sort of satisfaction. Even this dream version of Lance is as inexperienced as his real-life counterpart — his kiss is sloppy, his tongue sliding against Keith’s in an unpracticed, clumsy way, but that makes it all the more better. Something possessive in Keith’s blood sings at the idea of claiming such a powerful being for his own, but he’s far too distracted at the moment to try and parse meaning from the reaction at the moment.

When Lance is sufficiently distracted by his mouth, Keith adds another finger, slowly fucking him open. He wonders briefly if Lance even _needs_ preparation, since this isn’t real, but pushes the thought aside: regardless of what may or may not be necessary in a dream world, Keith has no interest in anything but mutual pleasure between them.

He focuses on the movement of his hand, slick fingers driving in and out, and hardly notices he’s muttering quiet praises — soft _That’s it, you’re doing great-_ s and _There we go, relax_ es — until his words pause, too concentrated on finding Lance’s prostate, and the reaper whines out, almost petulantly, “Why’d you stop?”

Noting the eagerness with which Lance asks for praise, Keith opts for showing rather than telling. He licks his lips, tracking the way Lance’s gaze seems to lock onto his mouth, before his fingers brush against the spot he’d been aiming for. Lance curses, tensing around his digits and seeming to experience a full-body convulsion at the action, and it’s _perfect._

“You ready?” he asks, anticipation coloring his tone. His cock aches with the need to drive into Lance, but he thinks he could spend hours like this, stretching and opening the man beneath him until he’s a writhing, sobbing mess of begging pleas.

“God,” Lance breathes, and he’s a gorgeous, disheveled mess. _“Please.”_

It’s an invitation if he’s ever heard one. Keith wastes no time in squeezing out more lube to slick his own dick, and then he’s pushing into Lance, eyes slipping closed against his will at the too-tight resistance he faces before  _finally_ breaching Lance's entrance. He bottoms out relatively quick after the initial friction — bless this hazy dreamland that bends the rules of reality in subtle, satisfying ways — and groans loudly and in tandem with the noises Lance is currently making.

He can’t control the instinctive, minute thrusts of his hips, but Lance doesn’t seem to mind, and that more than anything makes it harder to control himself. Despite the unreality of a dream and its infinite possibilities, Keith knows he’s not going to last. Lance seems impossibly tight, hot pulsing heat around his dick, and if Keith didn’t know he was a harbinger of death, he’d _swear_ Lance was heavensent.

As he thrusts into Lance, hips moving with jarring force as he gives in to the urge to fuck him senseless, Keith's focus narrows to a tiny pinprick of sensation; all he can think of is _Lance,_ and the way he smells, and how tight he feels as Keith fucks into him, and his _noises —_

It’s abrupt when Lance comes, although not unexpected. He’s beautiful, eyes scrunched in the complex haze of pleasure-pain as orgasm wracks his entire body, and the way he clenches wonderfully around Keith’s dick means he isn’t far behind him. His own orgasm overtakes him with a shudder, vision whiting out as he’s overwhelmed by the blissful sensation of endorphins washing over him. It’s the best orgasm he’s ever had, and beyond the racing of his heart there’s a whisper of magic — his? Lance’s? he has no idea — washing over the two of them, and it’s so potent he can almost _feel_ the way it purrs, satiated by their fucking.

Keith wakes to an uncomfortable mess in his boxers, but even the unpleasant awakening can’t wipe the content, sex-satisfied smirk from his lips.

 

**Author's Note:**

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